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
Round numbers are always false.
Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage.
When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.
Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.
To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.
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 nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.