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
Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.
Knowledge always desires increase, it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.
The triumph of hope over experience.
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.
Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.
No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.
Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.
Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from time to come.
All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.
Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.
What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.