Samuel Johnson

"Resolve not to be poor; whatever you have, spend less."

"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth."

"Friendship may be said to require nourishment of continual intercourse and mutual offices."

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering the attitudes of their minds."

"He that is uncertain is miserable; the man who knows not what to do or where to go is in a deplorable state."

"There is no passion so important to the human heart as the passion of hope."

"A man may reverse his character as completely as he reverses his coat."

"The same moral principles that guide ordinary human beings in their lives should guide all men in their political actions."

"Nature has given us two ears, but one tongue, implying that we should listen more than we speak."

"The great business of his life is to escape thinking about the conditions of his own existence."

"When a man talks of the support of his family, he is not necessarily describing his actual situation."

"The habit of usefulness is as powerful as any appetite or desire, and grows with feeding upon good deeds."

"A musical education is a more powerful instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul."

"Revenge is the common delight of vulgar minds, the refuge of desperate and cowardly spirits."

"The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express."

"We are not here merely to make a living. We are here to enrich the world, and we impoverish ourselves if we forget this errand."

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every man has a right to knock him down for it."

"A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority."

"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."

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."

"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone capable of carrying the society to wealth and prosperity."

"The habit of suspicion is not easily overcome, and a man does not readily trust where he has once been betrayed."

"Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

"Nothing is more common than mutual dislike between women and men; the difference is that women feel more obliged to conceal it."

"The distribution of his estate was a task requiring skill and prudence, and it was no small praise that he was equal to it."

"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."

"The greatest evils in the world are not always the most notorious."

"A man's health is his main treasure; all his studies and all his labors should be directed to the preservation of it."

"Wonder is a modification of surprise; it is imagination finding new images for old objects."

"Custom is the most powerful of all things; it is the fashion of the world which moulds all things."