Quote

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Many
Merit
Feast
Content
Obtained
Whenever
Continual
Fortune
Riot
Morsels
Praise
Obliged
Commendation
Therefore
Excess
Banquet
Wealth
Sets
Recompense
Single
Enjoyment
Banquets

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Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
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Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
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It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.
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The civilities of the great are never thrown away.
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I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.
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All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
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Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
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To scatter praise or blame without regard to justice is to destroy the distinction of good and evil. Many have no other test of actions than general opinion and all are so far influenced by a sense of reputation that they are often restrained by fear of reproach, and excited by hope of honour, when other principles have lost their power.
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Was ever poet so trusted before?
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Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
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Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.
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A small country town is not the place in which one would choose to quarrel with a wife every human being in such places is a spy.
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Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
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He that would travel for the entertainment of others should remember that the great object of remark is human life.
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Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim and when you are calculating, calculate.
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These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.
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Books, says Lord Bacon, can never teach us the use of books the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books no one so meanly, as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.
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There is no idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business, and by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation, and hurries him rapidly from place to place.
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Pension: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.
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There is not, perhaps, to a mind well instructed, a more painful occurrence, than the death of one we have injured without reparation.
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