Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single biographical work in the whole of literature," James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth18 September 1709
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.
Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible.
Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.
He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.
No one ever became great by imitation.
The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.
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.
Whatever is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity.
Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.