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
To hear complaints is tiresome to the miserable and the happy.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Complaining, Complaints, Pessimism
The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Sadness, Unhappiness
Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with too much dejection.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Fear, Evil
Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their own imagination, which sometimes puts sceptres in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Imagination, Solitude
A jest breaks no bones.
—Samuel Johnson
In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Confidence
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Friendship, Feelings, Love
If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Will, Friend, Friendship, New, Life, Friends
Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other. Such are the changes that keep the mind in action; we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit.
—Samuel Johnson
Prosperity’s right hand is industry, and her left hand is frugality.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Prosperity
Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Censorship
Despair is criminal.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Self-Pity, Hedonism
Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Pain
Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, or captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable; nor does it appear that the happiest lot of terrestrial existence can set us above the want of this general blessing; or that life, when the gifts of nature and of fortune are accumulated upon it, would not still be wretched, were it not elevated and delighted by the expectation of some new possession, of some enjoyment yet behind, by which the wish shall at last be satisfied, and the heart filled up to its utmost extent.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Hope
Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Simplicity
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Right, Rightness, Suffering, Trust, Cheating
Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour way.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Sorrow
Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Marriage
Life is but short; no time can be afforded but for the indulgence of real sorry, or contests upon questions seriously momentous. Let us not throw away any of our days upon useless resentment, or contend who shall hold out longest in stubborn malignity. It is best not to be angry; and best, in the next place, to be quickly reconciled.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Anger
Sir, I have never complained of the world; nor do I think I have reason to complain. It is rather to be wondered at that I have so much.
—Samuel Johnson
I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Humankind, Humanity, Integrity
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
Security will produce danger.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Danger, Security
There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Sorrow, Sadness
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
Every man is of importance to himself.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Self-Discovery
The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Learning
To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when we are not well.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Health
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
—Samuel Johnson
Topics: Theater
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