Quotes by Lexicographers - Page 6

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Samuel Johnson
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Samuel Johnson
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Samuel Johnson
While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Samuel Johnson
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson
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 one book.
Samuel Johnson
When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.
Willard R. Espy
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
Samuel Johnson
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
Samuel Johnson
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Samuel Johnson
That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.
Samuel Johnson
It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality only been more conspicuous than others, not more frequent, or more severe.
Samuel Johnson
Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You were a target that is now no longer being hit.
Thomas Sheridan
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
Samuel Johnson
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson
Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind.
Samuel Johnson
Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!
Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
Singing when no one else is around is always good. I especially like belters. Good, loud singing is probably better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it's cheaper, too. I also think people should never turn down an opportunity to hold a baby. There's something about the feel of a new baby in your arms that just fixes you.
Erin McKean
In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
Samuel Johnson
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
Samuel Johnson
It is necessary to hope... for hope itself is happiness.
Samuel Johnson