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
Exercise is labor without weariness.
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.
You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not - silence is the sharper sword.
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
What is easy is seldom excellent.
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.
Plenty is the original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.