Samuel Johnson

Hope is itself a species of happiness.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.