If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
The uniform necessities of human nature produce in a great measure uniformity of life, and for part of the day make one place like another; to dress and to undress, to eat and to sleep, are the same in London as in the country.
Power is gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent.
It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.
The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.
Longer Version:
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.
The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything. It is much easier to steal one hundred pounds than to get it by labour or any other way.
When a man marries a widow his jealousies revert to the past: no man is as good as his wife says her first husband was.
The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.
Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
This man Chesterfield, I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.
He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.
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 the weary pilgrimage.
I have all my life long been lying in bed till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.
So scanty is our present allowance of happiness that in many situations life could scarcely be supported if hope were not allowed to relieve the present hour by pleasures borrowed from the future.
Pension: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.
Such is the emptiness of human enjoyment that we are always impatient of the present. Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust.
We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor.
Affectation naturally counterfeits those excellences which are placed at the greatest distance from possibility of attainment, because, knowing our own defects, we eagerly endeavor to supply them with artificial excellence.
I do not care to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I believe he is an attorney.
Those whose abilities or knowledge incline them most to deviate from the general round of life are recalled from eccentricity by the laws of their existence.
Accustom your children constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.
Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.
It is not the desire of new acquisitions, but the glory of conquests, that fires the soldier's breast; as indeed the town is seldom worth much, when it has suffered the devastations of a siege.
It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.
Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only given, To all the lower world denied.
Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.
The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls.
Their origin is commonly unknown; for the practice often continues when the cause has ceased, and concerning superstitious ceremonies it is in vain to conjecture; for what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain.
Conjecture as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow.
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
A patriot is he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest.
Resentment is a union of sorrow with malignity; a combination of a passion which all endeavor to avoid with a passion which all concur to detest.
Cunning has effect from the credulity of others, rather than from the abilities of those who are cunning. It requires no extraordinary talents to lie and deceive.
Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue; and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
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.
Where necessity ends, desire and curiosity begin; and no sooner are we supplied with everything nature can demand than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.
To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others.
When emulation leads us to strive for self-elevation by merit alone, and not by belittling another, then it is one of the grandest possible incentives to action.
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.
All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied.
The expense is damnable, the position is ridiculous, and the pleasure fleeting.
It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation.
No wonder, Sir, that he is vain; a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.
To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove, at least, our power, and show that our favour is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.
But, perhaps, the flatterer is not often detected; for an honest mind is not apt to suspect, and no one exerts the power of discernment with much vigour when selflove favors the deceit.
Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty.
The relief of enemies has a tendency to unite mankind in fraternal affection.
Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.
When we see our enemies and friends gliding away before us, let us not forget that we are subject to the general law of mortality, and shall soon be where our doom will be fixed forever.
It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.
But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime
Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime;
An age that melts with unperceived decay,
And glides in modest Innocence away.
Get together a hundred or two men, however sensible they may be, and you are very likely to have a mob.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused.
Longer Version:
Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.
His most frequent ailment was the headache which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee.
When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed.
No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate.
Those authors are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence.
God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?
Bashfulness may sometimes exclude pleasure, but seldom opens any avenue to sorrow or remorse.
In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.
There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence.
Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Parents and children seldom act in concert:
each child endeavors to appropriate
the esteem or fondness of the parents,
and the parents, with yet less temptation,
betray each other to their children.
No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.
These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.
Attainment is followed by neglect, possession by disgust, and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to many another course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last.
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.
Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness.
Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.
Quotes by Samuel Johnson are featured in:
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