Browse 11 quotations connecting Samuel Johnson with Wisdom, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Rasselas, The Idler, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Rasselas, The Idler, The Vanity of Human Wishes.
“Example is always more efficacious than precept.”
Observed practice can teach more effectively than instruction alone because it shows principles operating in concrete action.
Source note: Rasselas, Chapter XXX; spoken by Imlac during a discussion of history, art and the practical use of studying what earlier people accomplished.
“The present state of things is the consequence of the former.”
Understanding present conditions requires tracing the earlier choices and causes that produced them rather than treating the present as isolated.
Source note: Rasselas, Chapter XXX; Imlac argues that studying history helps people understand the sources of present benefits and harms.
“Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”
The novel resists fantasies of perfect circumstances by emphasizing that difficulty follows people across different places and conditions.
Source note: Rasselas, Chapter XVI; spoken by Imlac while comparing European life with the travelers’ expectations of happiness.
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
Knowledge needs ethical direction, while good intentions need understanding; either quality becomes inadequate when separated from the other.
Source note: Chapter 41; the Astronomer explains why both competence and moral character are needed for trust.
“But improvement is naturally slow.”
The sentence cautions against expecting useful reform to produce immediate visible results, especially when ambitious projects confront ordinary constraints.
Source note: The Idler, No. 88; Johnson is discussing a fictional philosophical society whose grand plans meet the slow pace of practical improvement.
“Customs are not to be changed but for better.”
The maxim sets a burden on reform: novelty alone is not enough; a proposed change should be able to show a practical or rational advantage.
Source note: The Idler, No. 90; Johnson is discussing gesture and public speaking, not asserting that every inherited custom should remain untouched.
“We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves.”
Private expectations can exceed what anyone else demands of us, so a life may feel disappointing chiefly by comparison with unfulfilled plans known only to oneself.
Source note: The Idler, No. 88; the surrounding paragraph concerns private hopes, proposed tasks and the gap between imagined achievement and lived action.
“there are lower degrees of constancy necessary to common virtue”
Johnson distinguishes heroic steadfastness from the smaller, repeated forms of constancy needed for ordinary moral life.
Source note: The Idler, No. 11; this paper is not among the numbers Johnson’s own advertisement excluded from his authorship.
“And pause awhile from Learning to be wise;”
Johnson distinguishes accumulating learning from exercising judgment, asking the scholar to interrupt pursuit of knowledge long enough to examine what wisdom requires.
Source note: The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire; the line introduces a section on the hazards and disappointments surrounding learned ambition.
“See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just; To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust.”
Johnson depicts public recognition and collective wisdom as delayed and imperfect, suggesting that societies may honor merit only after the person who deserved it is gone.
Source note: The Vanity of Human Wishes; part of the poem’s reflection on learning, public judgment and historical recognition.
“Still raise for Good the supplicating Voice, But leave to Heav'n the Measure and the Choice.”
The poem’s devotional close allows prayer for good while counseling humility about the exact form or measure in which that good should arrive.
Source note: The Vanity of Human Wishes, closing movement; Johnson shifts from satirical catalogues of disappointed ambition toward explicitly Christian devotional counsel.