Top 38 Dr Johnson Quotes
#1. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#2. I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.
Vladimir Nabokov
#3. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?
Virginia Woolf
#4. ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author's ideas that they were concatenated without abruption.
Ambrose Bierce
#5. whoever goes to bed before midnight is a rogue"
Dr Johnson
Dr Johnson
#6. As Dr. Johnson said: "God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days." Why should you and I?
Dale Carnegie
#7. Like Dr. Johnson, I'm an Abstainer: I find it far easier to give up something altogether than to indulge moderately. And this distinction has profound implications for habits.
Gretchen Rubin
#8. Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.
Jane Porter
#9. But let not little men triumph upon knowing that Johnson was an HYPOCHONDRIACK, was subject to what the learned, philosophical, and pious Dr. Cheyne has so well treated under the title of 'The English Malady.
Samuel Johnson
#10. I'm an advocate of the great Dr. Johnson, the English man of letters who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.
George Galloway
#11. You have a mother?"
He quirked a brow. "Did you think mine was some sort of divine birth? My father was a remarkable man, but even he was not that talented.
Julia Quinn
#12. I've been waiting to meet you, did you enjoy my notes?"-Selena
Micalea Smeltzer
#13. If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.
Charles Portis
#14. One of my greatest pleasures in motor racing is qualifying. You have loads of freedom from pushing a lap the whole way. I've always been very good in qualifying in the past; everything I've done, I've got pole positions.
Bruno Senna
#15. I think the War on Terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America, and a less safe world.
Stephen Gaghan
#16. I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see.
Joan Jett
#17. After 20 years of doing comedy, I find dramatic work more challenging.
Marla Gibbs
#18. One of Dr. Johnson's ingredients of happiness was, "A little less time than you want." That means always to have so many things you want to see, to have, and to do, that no day is quite long enough for all you think you would like to get done before you go to bed.
Helen Hunt Jackson
#19. Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.
Ambrose Bierce
#20. Satire is the antidote to Pollyanna and Dr. Pangloss. It focuses our gaze sharply upon the the contrast between things as they are and as they should be.
Edgar Johnson
#22. Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#23. In 1759, the great lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson wrote: 'Advertisements are now so numerous they are very negligently perused.' An opinion many people express to this day, without realizing its centuries-old ancestry.
Winston Fletcher
#24. Dr Johnson died in 1944. The suspicion exists that he was silenced ... However two federal inspectors did examine his hospital record in the late 1950's. They concluded it was likely that he was poisoned.
Barry Lynes
#25. I find skydiving really hard. I broke my back while skydiving when I was in the military, and for 18 months all my nightmares were about falling.
Bear Grylls
#26. Dr Sue Johnson is the most original contributor to couples therapy to
come along in the last thirty years. This book will touch your heart,
stimulate your mind and give you practical strategies for improving
your relationship.
William J Doherty
#27. Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
William Hazlitt
#28. Dr Johnson said, the inscription should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be.
James Boswell
#29. Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley
#30. I just kind of wanted to do something where you don't just see 'Kardashian' everywhere.
Rob Kardashian
#31. I do not think very highly of Madame D'Arblay's books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson's old stilts.
Mary Russell Mitford
#32. You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do; but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.
Samuel Johnson
#33. My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
Flannery O'Connor
#34. Dr. Everest, got up and gave us a little pep talk. Mostly it boiled down to the fact that it was autumn, and everyone was back, and while that was a great thing, people better not get cocky or misbehave or he'd personally kill us all.
He didn't actually say those words, but that was the subtext.
Maureen Johnson
#35. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren G. Bennis
#36. But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.
Kate Morton
#38. Dr. Calder [a Unitarian minister] said of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson on the publications of Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, that he was like Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own pack.
Horace Walpole