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
Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliate the other's failings because they are his own.
Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.
Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail.
A fallible being will fail somewhere.
Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings because they are his own.
Politeness is fictitious benevolence. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other.
The arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford
Dublin, though a place much worse than London, is not so bad as Iceland.
Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize
Prejudice not being funded on reason cannot be removed by argument.
Prudence keeps life safe, but it does not often make it happy.
Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity (in a library), most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered