Samuel Johnson: Trending quotes

Samuel Johnson trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Samuel Johnson: 724 quotes26 likes

“And sure th' Eternal Master found
His single talent well employ'd.”

Stanza 7
Elegy on the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, A Practiser in Physic (1783)

“Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.”

1743
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

“I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night; and then the nap takes me.”

1775
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

“Mrs. Montagu has dropt me. Now, Sir, there are people whom one should like very well to drop, but would not wish to be dropped by.”

March 1781, p. 465
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV

“Employment, sir, and hardships prevent melancholy.”

1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

“This mournful truth is ev'rywhere confessed —
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.”

London: A Poem (1738) http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/london2.html, lines 176–177

“A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.”

Quoted in the "Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions and Occasional Reflections" of Sir John Hawkins (1787-1789) in Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), vol. II, p. 11, edited by George Birkbeck Hill

“The first years of man must make provision for the last.”

Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 27

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

April 5, 1776, p. 302
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III

“A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 14 (5 May 1750) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Joh1Ram.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1 <br class="br">The Rambler (1750–1752)

“That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.”

1770, p. 181
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

“He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.”

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 221

“EXCISE — A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.”

Samuel Johnson book A Dictionary of the English Language

A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

“It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”

Samuel Johnson The Idler

No. 11 (June 24, 1758)
The Idler (1758–1760)

“Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise!
From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires, a driv'ler and a show.”

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 316

“Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.”

The Life of Cowley
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

March 1759, p. 97
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

“A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.”

December 21, 1762
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

“Shakspeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven: but this does not refute my general assertion.”

October 19, 1769, p. 170
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

“Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.”

July 20, 1762
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I