Happiness Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s line is a little social knife: polished, civilized, and meant to draw blood without looking like it. “Let me smile with the wise” sounds like a toast to good company, but the verb choice is telling. He doesn’t say learn from, argue with, or even sit with the wise. He’ll “smile” with them - the low-commitment currency of salon life, a performance of taste and belonging. Wisdom becomes less a moral North Star than a badge you can wear in public.

Then comes the sharper turn: “and feed with the rich.” Not dine, not converse, not share; feed. It’s bluntly animal, almost parasitic, reducing social aspiration to appetite. The wise provide polish; the rich provide calories. Johnson compresses an entire 18th-century ecosystem of patronage into one couplet-length craving: the writer, the hanger-on, the ambitious striver who knows that intellect earns applause but money buys dinner.

The subtext is double-edged because Johnson himself lived inside that contradiction. He prized moral seriousness and independence, yet he also navigated a world where authors often survived by attaching themselves to patrons, clubs, and benefactors. The line can be read as a self-mocking confession, but it also functions as indictment: a culture that forces talent to chase tables instead of truth. Its wit lands because it refuses to pretend our motives are pure. It’s a status map disguised as a smile.