Samuel Johnson

“A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.”

“Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth.”

“Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense.”

“Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.”

“He who praises everybody, praises nobody.”

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

“Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

“Smoking is a shocking thing--blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us.”

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

“The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.”

“The true, strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.”

“We are inclined to believe those we do not know, because they have never deceived us.”

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”