Samuel Johnson Quotes

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

O vanity, how little is thy force acknowledged or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity; sometimes of generosity; nay, thou hast the assurance to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue.

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.

One may be humble out of pride.

What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.

Pride destroys all symmetry and grace, and affectation is a more terrible enemy to fine faces than the small-pox.

A coxcomb is four-fifths affectation and one-fifth vanity.

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

The whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not.

In many of the things that people do, they themselves are the centre of attention, but they inscribe some other name on their banner.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

Who walks around proud of things they've done? That's an obnoxious quality.

The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.

Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.

Pride is at the bottom of a great many errors and corruptions, and even of many evil practices, which have a great show and appearance of humility.

As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

False modesty is the masterpiece of vanity: showing the vain man in such an illusory light that he appears in the reputation of the virtue quite opposite to the vice which constitutes his real character; it is a deceit.

Boasting is the outward form of the inner condition of pride.

Thus 'tis with all; their chief and constant care Is to seem everything but what they are.