Samuel Johnson Quotes on Philosophy

8 quotes

  1. He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

  2. It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

  3. To a pet nothing can be useless.

  4. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

  5. It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

  6. A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

  7. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

  8. All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

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