Quotes

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

[ Of Dwight Eisenhower, whose death pushed Joplin off the cover of Newsweek:] Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week.

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

Get It While You Can.

[ On William Shakespeare :] Reader, look

Down on me, down on me

[ On Shakespeare’s portrait :]

Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex. . . . Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is out to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Fear of Flying.

The Continental ship Providence, now lying at Boston, is bound on a short cruise, immediately; a few good men are wanted to make up her complement.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

The law is a jealous science.

[ To two women who commended him on his omission of vulgar words from his Dictionary of the English Language:] What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?

[ On overindulgence in drink, to the extent of becoming a beast :] He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

[Quotation] is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

[ When asked what he considered to be the real value of the Thrale Brewery, which, as executor, he was attempting to sell :] We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

[ To a follower of George Berkeley’s philosophy, which held that things exist only insofar as they are perceived by a mind :] Pray, Sir, don’t leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist.

I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.

[ On the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland :] Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.

Olivarii Goldsmith ,

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise.

No, Sir; to act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.

Why, sir, a man grows better humored as he grows older. He improves by experience. When young, he thinks himself of great consequence, and every thing of importance. As he advances in life, he learns to think himself of no consequence, and little things of little importance; and so he becomes more patient, and better pleased.

[ Of Lady Diana Beauclerk :] The woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on ’t.

[ Of Oliver Goldsmith’s apology in the London Chronicle for assaulting Thomas Evans :] He has, indeed, done it very well; but it is a foolish thing well done.

[ Replying to the question, “What, have you not read it through?” :] No, Sir, do you read books through?

[ Of Lord Mansfield, born in Scotland but educated in England :] Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

[ Of a man who remarried after the death of his first wife, with whom he had been unhappy :] The triumph of hope over experience.

Johnson observed, that “he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney .”

BOSEWELL: But is not the fear of death natural to man?

Being told she was remarkable for her humility and condescension to inferiors, he observed, that those were very laudable qualities, but it might not be so easy to discover who the lady’s inferiors were.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on ’t.

[ In response to Boswell’s observation that George Berkeley’s theory of the nonexistence of matter could not be refuted, Johnson kicked a large stone and said :] I refute it thus .

[ Of John Hawkins :] Sir John, Sir, is a very unclubable man.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth hence.

[ After being absent from a tutorial at Oxford because he had been “sliding in Christ Church meadow” :] JOHNSON: I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor. BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind. JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.

[ To a woman who asked him why he had defined pastern in his Dictionary of the English Language as a horse’s knee :] Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.

[ Of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:] New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

[ Referring to his fits of melancholia :] The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive. . . . When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking. . . . Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from a habitation like this?