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Sunday Morning Dr. Johnson Contest
I’ve long been determined that no matter the state of the world, Sundays on Ricochet should be a day of rest. So despite what’s happening out there, how anxiously compelled I feel to check the news, or how despairing it makes me, it’s time to relax with a Dr. Johnson contest.
The floor is now open for your submissions: What are the most immortal lines by or about Dr. Johnson?
I’ll go first:
We took tea, by Boswell’s desire; and I eat one bun, I think, that I might not be seen to fast ostentatiously. When I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try, because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try, in humble hope of the help of God.
Your turn.
Published in General, Literature
Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
It grieves me to reflect that poor Sam likely never had bourbon.
My favorite is, “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
Johnson is far from the first to ever express such a sentiment. Manuel II Paleologus expressed a similar judgment of Islam.
Johnson’s version is quite a bit pithier than Manuel’s.
Or scotch.
“Quoting Samuel Johnson: “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.”
― James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
He also said, nature has given so much power to women, the laws wisely give them little-
I like his skepticism as to politicians:
From Boswell’s Life of Johnson
The distinction an American conservative might add to that is that the patriotism professed by someone who ignores the founding principles of the United States, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is a pretender in addition to being a scoundrel.
American exceptionalism exists because the country was founded on ideals. Those ideals can be embraced by a person who comes here from anywhere and who then rightfully claim to be an American. Lincoln covered this eloquently in one of the Lincoln/Douglas debates.
The Left, with its Trojan Horse of multi-culturalism, seeks to destroy that very American form of patriotism and replace it with an allegiance to a utopian existence based on leftist egalitarianism where all people and all values are equally important.
OK, I must confess, I remember very little of the Dr. Johnson we read in my sophomore level course in 18th C. prose, but I do remember rather a lot of enjoyment.
Why comment? Because the very erudition exhibited by Ricochet’s even inviting posts about him is another reason I love Ricochet, and I will happily renew when my membership comes up.
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
“I refute it thus.”
I believe bishop Berkeley meant to say, we are all in the mind of God. Possibly, he was wiser than the old Tory…
If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Reading through, it looks like I might squeak out a win here. WhaddahIgit? WhaddahIgit? WhaddahIgit? Cannachoose? Cannachoose? Cannachoose?
How ’bout a Reagan membership to the end of time? I’ll only need it til the rapture but BDB can have it when I’m gone.
Here’s the typical British wit grasping at a now-forgotten truth: Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. From Johnson’s life of Milton, who showed the best British wit-
“Without good humour, learning and bravery can only confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance. Without good humour virtue may awe by its dignity and amaze by its brightness, but must always be viewed at a distance, and will scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator.”
I believe the old Tory was dead wrong about that last-
Neither had been invented in Ben Johnson’s time. They were a couple of the first evils of modern industrial society.
Just so.
The Revolution ran on hard cider, madiera, and rum. If they had been drinking bourbon, it would have been over in half the time.
My first nomination is from The Rambler No. 23, June 5, 1750, “The Rambler and His Critics”:
That every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience, without any regard to the opinions of the rest of the world, is one of the first precepts of moral prudence; justified not only by the suffrage of reason, which declares that none of the gifts of heaven are to lie useless, but by the voice likewise of experience, which will soon inform us that, if we make the praise or blame of others the rule of our conduct, we shall be distracted by a boundless variety of irreconcilable judgments, be held in perpetual suspense between contrary impulses, and consult for ever without determination.
My second nomination is from The Adventurer, No, 85, August 28, 1753, “The Role of the Scholar”:
An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgement, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.
Such is the talk of many who think themselves wise, and of some who are thought wise by others; of whom part probably believe their own tenets, and part may be justly suspected of endeavouring to shelter their ignorance in multitudes, and of wishing to destroy that reputation· which they have no hopes to share. It will, I believe, be found invariably true-that-learning was never decried by .any learned man; and what credit can be given to those who venture to condemn that which they do not know?
‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.
Ah yes. but in Lives of the Poets we also read, in reference to Paradise Lost:
To the completeness or integrity of the design, nothing can be objected; it has distinctly and clearly what Aristotle requires—a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is perhaps no poem, of the same length, from which so little can be taken without apparent mutilation.
Whoa, you ran ahead to next week’s contest!
I can’t resist one more from Lives of the Poets:
If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.
What does “just” mean here?
I’d say it means “apt.”
That’s one of my favorites, too. Definitely top-ten.
I like this day of rest. :)
So, me thinks your ‘recovery’ is not going too well. A little bit of back sliding here (from Ricochet bio: “Recovering Intellectual. Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering…)
:)
Two funny attributions.
“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
In his definition of oats:
‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’
Delightfully chauvinistic.