Samuel Johnson Quotes

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

I did my best. I guess my best wasn't good enough.

In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.

As the sun sets, we've all had those nights where you question your choices and where your life is going.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

I had now been in the United States of America something like five years, working here and there as the inclination seized me, which, I must confess, was not often. I was certainly getting some enjoyment out of life, but now and then the waste of time appalled me, for I still have a conviction that I was born to a different life.

I wake up in the morning, and I look in a mirror, and I go, 'Is this really all I got? Is this all the universe has given me?'

When you're getting older, you think about what you have to offer, and what's the point of your life.

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you've done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant?

I think everyone has questions in their mind. Did they do their very best?

I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world... Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.

It feels like I am wasting time. I mean, that's always the case. My life doesn't add up to anything.

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.

No matter what you achieve in life, you're always wondering, 'Is there something I should be doing? Is there something I'm missing?

When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?

I think what I've tried to do is make the world a better place. I think that's what's really important. Nobody remembers who sold the most togas in Rome. In terms of legacy, people remember the great villains more than they remember the great heroes. So I think how you feel about yourself is the most significant question. What do you say about yourself when you put your head on the pillow? Are you really proud of what you're doing and the way you're doing it? I think it's really a fundamental question.

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?

Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.