Observations of Samuel Johnson:

• “We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.”
• “I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
• “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
• “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”
• “In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.”
• “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
• “It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.”
• “I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.”
• “Example is always more efficacious than precept.”
• “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.”
• “Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.”
• “It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.”
• “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
• “Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.”
• “Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.”
• “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.”
• “The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.”
• “[S]uch is the delight of mental superiority, that none on whom nature or study have conferred it, would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss.”
• “The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before.”

Harold Nicolson wrote, “Dr. Johnson is the only conversationalist who triumphs over time.”

“What makes a fire so pleasant is, I think, that it is a live thing in a dead room.” — Sydney Smith

“It is important to learn to be surprised by simple facts.” — Noam Chomsky

“Here is a wonder: we have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it.” — Montaigne

More aphorisms from German physicist G.C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

• “How much depends on the way things are presented in this world can be seen from the very fact that coffee drunk out of wine glasses is really miserable stuff, as is meat cut at the table with a pair of scissors. Worst of all, as I once actually saw, is butter spread on a piece of bread with an old though very clean razor.”
• “A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.”
• “There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points ‘born’ and ‘died’ farther away from one another … The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”
• “As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown.”
• “One has to do something new in order to see something new.”
• “People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.”
• “Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.”
• “First we have to believe, and then we believe.”
• “Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.”
• “What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.”
• “I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.”
• “It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.”
• “A grave is still the best fortification against the storms of destiny.”

See The Sage of Göttingen, From the Notebooks, Diamonds and Pearls, and Insight.