Samuel Johnson

"The dignity of mankind rests upon knowledge."

"A grateful heart is a tranquil mind."

"Hope is the anchor of the soul."

"The wise man knows his own ignorance."

"Adversity reveals the substance of one's character."

"Justice without mercy is cruelty."

"The pursuit of happiness without virtue is hollow."

"The true measure of a man is not how he behaves in moments of comfort and convenience, but how he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect."

"The way to be nothing is to do nothing."

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear."

"No one has ever yet become great without enduring much."

"Being in a state of confusion is often a sign that a transformation is beginning to occur."

"The mind is never satisfied with what it knows because it can always imagine something greater."

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

"The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope."

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition."

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."

"There is nothing so consolatory to a ruined man as a letter of condolence from a rival."

"The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts."

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

"Every man naturally desires knowledge; and the circumstances of his life give him more or less opportunity for its attainment."

"The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken."

"It is the nature of hope to be disappointed."

"Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable."

"There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government."

"A man who does not read has no advantage over a man who cannot read."

"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

"Praise, like gold and diamonds, has its value only from its scarcity."

"To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear things in privacy, and then in conversation to come out with recovered and renovated thoughts, is the glory of a free man."