Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was a British lexicographer, writer, critic, and conversationalist who made lasting contributions to English literature. Often referred to as Dr. Johnson, and regarded as the most significant intellectual in British history, he wrote many famous essays, sermons, poetry, biographies, literary criticisms, plays, and novels.
Johnson started writing in his mid-20s, publishing essays, poems, and prose. During his 30s, he contributed more than 200 essays to magazines and launched his colossal undertaking: an authoritative A Dictionary of the English Language (1755.) With the help of six clerical assistants, Johnson completed the lexicon in nine years. Published in two volumes, it contained more than 42,000 entries. This dictionary made Johnson famous, and it remains his most enduring accomplishment.
Despite his prodigious literary output, Johnson is most remembered not for anything he wrote, but for the biography that James Boswell (1740–95) composed of Johnson. Boswell idolized Johnson and kept scrupulously detailed diaries of his mannerisms, characteristics, routines, decisions, opinions, and everything else about his life. Boswell used these notes to write a comprehensive biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791.) Owing to its thorough portrayal of its subject as a complete person and not just as a catalog of events and achievements in his life, The Life of Samuel Johnson is regarded the definitive precursor to modern biographies. Boswell’s records of Johnson’s numerous aphorisms also made him one of the most-quoted writers in the English language.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Samuel Johnson
A man may be so much of every thing, that he is nothing of any thing.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Concentration, Focus, Identity, Self-Discovery
Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Learning
To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Unhappiness
Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.
—Samuel Johnson
Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship
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
Topics: Books, Stupidity, Reading
I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Law
At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Aging, Age
Quotation, sir, is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it: classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Quotations
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Goals
Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship
I take the true definition of exercise to be, labor without weariness.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Exercise
We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real, authentic history.—That certain kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend on as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: History
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Writing
The vicious count their years; virtuous, their acts.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Helping
I do not much wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery.
—Samuel Johnson
Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
—Samuel Johnson
Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Opinion, Public opinion
How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did, not know that he should never die; that what now acts, shall continue its agency, and what now thinks, shall think on forever.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Immortality
Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty. He that is extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Thrift
A man, whose great qualities want the ornament of exterior attractions, is like a naked mountain with mines of gold, which will be frequented only till the treasure is exhausted.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Manners
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Enjoyment, Equality
Despair is criminal.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Self-Pity, Hedonism
Riches exclude only one inconvenience, and that is poverty.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Riches
It is wonderful to think how men of very large estates not only spend their yearly income, but are often actually in want of money. It is clear, they have not value for what they spend.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Riches, Wealth
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labors, than when you give money merely in charity.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Charity
Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Sincerity
There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Honesty, Friend, Integrity, Friendship, Confidence, Love
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Patriotism
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