Samuel Johnson Quotes on Education (9 Quotes)

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Learn that the present hour alone is man's.

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, And a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated. . .

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. . . . He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame. . .