Samuel Johnson Quotes

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into the short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them.

Proverbs may be said to be the abridgment of wisdom.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Proverbs may not improperly be called the philosophy of the common people.

I'd lived by quotations, practically all my life.

Sayings remain meaningless until they are embodied in habits.

I made so many mistakes when I was younger.

We are all human, and mistakes are just around the corner, but experience lets you try to avoid them.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

And never forget, there is memory.

So many objects, so many memories. Each was being labelled and packed away in bags just as it was in her mind. To be stored in an area that would sometime be called upon to teach and help in future life.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.

Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs: for occasions have their revolutions, and what has once been advantageously used may be so again, either as an old thing or a new one.

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.