Zitat des Tages von Samuel Johnson:
I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.
There are charms made only for distant admiration.
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.
If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?
What is easy is seldom excellent.
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.
Exercise is labor without weariness.
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
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.
There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.
The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.
There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
Wine gives a man nothing... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.
Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.