Quotes About Samuel Johnson

Evil into the mind of God or man May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave No spot or stain behind. Milton.

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established

It has been, from age to age, an affectation to love the pleasure of solitude, among those who cannot possibly be supposed qualified for passing life in that manner.Spectator,No 264.

It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together; because it gives his answerer double work.Swift.

He ended, and his words impression leftOf much amazement to th' infernal crew,Distracted and surpris'd with deep dismayAt these sad tidings.Milton'sParadise Regained,b. i.3.

No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.

Boswell: That, sir, was great fortitude of mind.Johnson: No, sir; stark insensibility.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel, and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death.

Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick.

There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones.

Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self- interest.

Hell is paved with good intentions.

You can talk about depression as a chemical imbalance all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a demon, a beast, or a black dog, as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.

It was, however, a delicate matter for colonists to accuse the British of trying to enslave them, because abject slavery was such a prominent feature of colonial life. This was noted with irony, of course, in England, where Dr. Samuel Johnson, for example, asked, "How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?

It is by studying little things," wrote Samuel Johnson, "that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.

A fishing-rod was a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.

Samuel Johnson once remarked that it was surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contained.

That great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson.