The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. – Samuel Johnson
The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book. – Samuel Johnson
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it. – Samuel Johnson
What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known. – Samuel Johnson
We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “Virginibus Puerisque II,” Virginibus Puerisque, 1881