Top 500 Samuel Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.”

— Samuel Johnson

302. “A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing than to act one; no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down.”

— Samuel Johnson

303. “The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.”

— Samuel Johnson

304. “Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.”

— Samuel Johnson

305. “The business of the poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species.”

— Samuel Johnson

306. “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.”

— Samuel Johnson

307. “A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.”

— Samuel Johnson

308. “Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.”

— Samuel Johnson

309. “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.”

— Samuel Johnson

310. “The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.”

— Samuel Johnson

311. “He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.”

— Samuel Johnson

312. “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.”

— Samuel Johnson

313. “It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification.”

— Samuel Johnson

314. “The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.”

— Samuel Johnson

315. “The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.”

— Samuel Johnson

316. “Gloomy calm of idle vacancy.”

— Samuel Johnson

317. “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.”

— Samuel Johnson

318. “Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.”

— Samuel Johnson

319. “In Shakespeare’s plays, the mourner hastening to bury his friend is all the time colliding with the reveller hastening to his wine.”

— Samuel Johnson

320. “Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.”

— Samuel Johnson

321. “London! the needy villain’s general home, The common sewer of Paris and of Rome! With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.”

— Samuel Johnson

322. “Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”

— Samuel Johnson

323. “The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public.”

— Samuel Johnson

324. “Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?”

— Samuel Johnson

325. “He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.”

— Samuel Johnson

326. “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?”

— Samuel Johnson

327. “A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.”

— Samuel Johnson

328. “There are charms made only for distant admiration.”

— Samuel Johnson

329. “Smoking is a shocking thing – blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people’s mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us.”

— Samuel Johnson

330. “There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.”

— Samuel Johnson

331. “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

— Samuel Johnson

332. “Grief is a species of idleness.”

— Samuel Johnson

333. “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.”

— Samuel Johnson

334. “Some have little power to do good, and have likewise little strength to resist evil.”

— Samuel Johnson

335. “The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.”

— Samuel Johnson

336. “He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.”

— Samuel Johnson

337. “The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.”

— Samuel Johnson

338. “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.”

— Samuel Johnson

339. “A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation – a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.”

— Samuel Johnson

340. “He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.”

— Samuel Johnson

341. “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.”

— Samuel Johnson

342. “A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.”

— Samuel Johnson

343. “All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.”

— Samuel Johnson

344. “Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.”

— Samuel Johnson

345. “The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.”

— Samuel Johnson

346. “Nature never gives everything at once.”

— Samuel Johnson

347. “He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale.”

— Samuel Johnson

348. “No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.”

— Samuel Johnson

349. “Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.”

— Samuel Johnson

350. “Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.”

— Samuel Johnson