Samuel Johnson Quotes on Perception

8 quotes

  1. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

  2. [Of Lord Chesterfield] This man, I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!

  3. 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.

  4. Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

  5. All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.

  6. Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

  7. Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.

  8. There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, 'His memory is going.'

All Samuel Johnson quotes