"Samuel Johnson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scandal-mongers of society, going from house to house, attending to everybody's business but their own, believing in witches, and ghosts, and horseshoes to keep the devil out of the churn, and by a godless life setting their children on the very verge of hell. The mothers of Samuel Johnson, and of Alfred the Great, and Isaac Newton, and of St. Augustine, and of Richard Cecil, and of President Edwards, for the most part ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... nod to him. Nevertheless, he was spoken to, asked questions about various of his fellow countrymen, and made at home. Presently, however, an elderly member who had been silent and whom I will designate as being of the Dr. Samuel Johnson type, said: "You seem to be having trouble in your packing ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... went to test her power was a poor Lichfield bookseller. He carried to her his little half-blind, sickly boy, who, by virtue either of her Majesty's beneficent fingers or from some other and better reason, grew up to be known as the famous author and lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson.[2] ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Dr. Samuel Johnson's charge that the Americans were a race of convicts, if he meant it to be taken seriously, is of course absurd. It is true that from time to time convicts were sent to the colonies. This is proved by the protests of the Assemblies and by laws passed to prohibit their ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... touching story told of the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson which has had an influence on many a boy who has heard it. Samuel's father Michael Johnson, was a poor bookseller in Lichfield, England. On market-days he used to carry a package of books to the village of ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... what I expected in those early days. He could repeat great screeds of Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin," which was his especial favourite. Music has often cheated me of what is to me the keenest pleasure in life. Like Samuel Johnson, I enjoy greatly "good talk," though I never took such a dominant part in it. There are two kinds of people who reduce me to something like silence—those who know too little and those who know too much. My brother-in-law's ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blind asylum. Phelps sits in a chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in English literature, whatever that may mean. Brownell is both L.H.D. and Litt.D., thus surpassing Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt, Coleridge and Malone by two. But the learning of these august umbilicarii, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile, foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. The appearance is there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-doctor's ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... illustrative dissertations, letters, and a memoir on the circumstances of the death of M. du Roule. It filled two volumes, or 636 pages of forty lines. This was published in 1728. It was on the 31st of October, 1728, that Samuel Johnson, aged nineteen, went to Pembroke College, Oxford, and Legrand's 'Voyage Historique d'Abissinie du R. P. Jerome Lobo, de la Compagnie de Jesus, Traduit du Portugais, continue et augmente de plusieurs Dissertations, Lettres et Memoires,' was one of ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... and knowledge of the Athenian people was a favourite object of the contemptuous derision of Samuel Johnson; a man who knew nothing of Greek literature beyond the common school-books, and who seems to have brought to what he had read scarcely more than the discernment of a common school-boy. He used to assert, with that arrogant absurdity which, in spite of his great abilities ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... limit to set to his ability I know not, for he was ever superior to occasion. Under ordinary circumstances it was difficult to estimate him because of his peculiarities—peculiarities that would have made a lesser man absurd, but that served to enhance his martial fame, as those of Samuel Johnson did his literary eminence. He once observed, in reply to an allusion to his severe marching, that it was better to lose one man in marching than five in fighting; and, acting on this, he invariably surprised the enemy—Milroy at McDowell, Banks and Fremont in the Valley, McClellan's ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... hands and stamped its feet in honor of Charles Lamb; but what does he say? "I walk up and down, thinking I am happy, but feeling I am not." Call the roll, and be quick about it. Samuel Johnson, the learned! Happy? "No. I am afraid I shall some day get crazy." William Hazlitt, the great essayist! Happy? "No. I have been for two hours and a half going up and down Paternoster Row with a volcano in my breast." Smollett, the witty author! Happy? "No. I am sick of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... When Samuel Johnson, on his death bed, made Joshua Reynolds promise he would do no more work on Sunday, he of course had no conception of the truth that Reynolds reached through work the same condition of mind that he, Johnson, had reached by going ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Mr. Samuel Johnson's black servant was solemnly waiting on his master, who always breakfasted too heartily, with a purpose. Peyrade wished to pass for a tippling Englishman; he never went out till he was half-seas over. He wore black cloth gaiters up to his knees, and padded to make his legs look stouter; his ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... cries of the weak and infirm. Yet the same man felt no touch of pity for the Loyalists of the Revolution. To him they were detestable parricides, vile traitors, with no right to live. When we find this note in Washington, in America, we hardly wonder that the high Tory, Samuel Johnson, in England, should write that the proposed taxation was no tyranny, that it had not been imposed earlier because "we do not put a calf into the plough; we wait till he is an ox," and that the Americans were "a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... fame with The Old Cheshire Cheese in Elizabethan times and waxed great with Samuel Johnson presiding at the Fleet Street Inn where White Cheshire was served "with radishes or watercress or celery when in season," and Red Cheshire was served toasted or stewed in a sort of Welsh Rabbit. (See ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... is that of Addison who died in 1719, of Steele who died in 1729, of Pope who died in 1744. It is the London into which Samuel Johnson came in 1738, at the age of twenty-nine—seven years before the manuscript of "Manoel de Gonzales" appeared in print. "How different a place," said Johnson, "London is to different people; but the intellectual man is struck with it as comprehending the whole of human life in all ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... which destroys the base of the deistical system. Another writer is notable: William Law's Serious Call is one of the books which has made a turning-point in many men's lives. It specially affected Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, and many of those who sympathised more or less with Wesley's movement. Law was driven by his sense of the aspects of the rationalist theories to adopt a different position. He became a follower of Behmen, and his mysticism ended by repelling ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen |
