Tag: Samuel Johnson

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

Samuel Johnson

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.

Samuel Johnson

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly.

Samuel Johnson

Pleasure of itself is not a vice.

Samuel Johnson

Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.

Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

Samuel Johnson

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.

Samuel Johnson

Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?

Samuel Johnson

He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?

Samuel Johnson

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanicks laughs at strength.

Samuel Johnson