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… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company. – Samuel Johnson
Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable. – Samuel Johnson
Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them. – Samuel Johnson
Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most. – Samuel Johnson
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. – Joseph De Maistre