Quotes from Leo Damrosch

An Irish clergyman was present at a dinner where someone asked what the greatest pleasure was, and Johnson replied, "Fucking." He added that the second best was drinking, "and therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink, though not all could fuck."47

Not for nothing was Smith's first book about moral philosophy. His concern, as Foley says, was the one that has haunted economic thinking ever since: "how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes.

You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried to in my time to be a philosopher; but I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

He liked to recall a statement the seventeenth-century diplomat William Temple made in retirement, that the gratifications of the public world are as nothing compared with "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.

Love is the fart Of every heart; It pains a man when 'tis kept close, And others doth offend when 'tis let loose.25

There is no arguing with Johnson, for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of

At the customary age of thirteen Blake was apprenticed to an engraver named James Basire in Great Queen Street near Covent Garden, less than a mile from home. The apprenticeship lasted for the usual seven years, during which he lived in Basire's house, usually with one or more other boys. The youths put in thirteen-hour days for a work week of seventy-eight hours, with only Sunday off, and that was usual too.

Blake took great pride in his skill: "I defy any man to cut cleaner strokes than I do, or rougher when I please." But he also acknowledged that "engraving is eternal work.... I curse and bless engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so intractable, though capable of such beauty and perfection.

why was I born with a different face, Why was I not born like the rest of my race? When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend Then I'm silent and passive and lose every friend.