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
Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Security, Risk
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Role models
Learn that the present hour alone is man’s.
—Samuel Johnson
Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, ‘I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.’
—Samuel Johnson
The future is purchased by the present.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: The Future, Present, Future
Knowledge always desires increase, it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Knowledge
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labors in any great or laudable undertaking has his fatigues first supported by hope and afterward rewarded by joy.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Achievement, Pleasure, Success & Failure, Difficulties, Life, Success, Sin
Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Courage
A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.
—Samuel Johnson
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
—Samuel Johnson
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Genius
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Expectation, Happiness, Aspirations, Hope
Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
—Samuel Johnson
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship
It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find any thing to say.
—Samuel Johnson
Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Design, Planning, Performance
One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Aging, Age
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the full value of time and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Forgiveness
Men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are honestly making money.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Money
The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Praise
I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Kindness
If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Perseverance, Determination
A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Cruelty
Those indeed who attain any excellence commonly spend life in one pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Goals, Dedication, Excellence, Aspirations
No man is much pleased with a companion, who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness for himself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship
Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Writing
Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.
—Samuel Johnson
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.
—Samuel Johnson
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Reality, Opportunities, Happiness
Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Riches
Sorrow is mere rust of the soul; activity will cleanse and brighten it.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Action, Sorrow
He who praises everybody praises nobody.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Praise, One liners
Marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Marriage
Hell is paved with good intentions.
—Samuel Johnson
The fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he proposes to remove.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Attitude, Contentment
Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Gratitude
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Effort
A jest breaks no bones.
—Samuel Johnson
Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life’s a short summer, man a flower;
He dies – alas! how soon he dies.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Carpe-diem
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Books, Reading
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