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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
Blackadder says, Dr. Johnson is author of “…the most pointless book since How to Learn French, was translated into French.”
I’ll go with William Blakes “An Island in the Moon, the opening stanza of object 10.”
It gets rather scatological from there, so I’ll just leave it at that.
(One of the most astonishing lines in all of English literature appears in the opening to Chapter 3 of this work. I can’t quote it here.)
Reminds me of this: “When asked by Dr Adams how long it would take to finish his dictionary Johnson replied: “Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in 3 years.” Dr. Adams replied that the French academy, which consists of forty members, took 40 years to compile their dictionary, yet Johnson replies that “Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred as 3 to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. I think Dr. Johnson said that, anyway. It has been serving me well for many years, even though I’ve never lived in London.
“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
Before hundreds more chime in with their suggestions, let me offer one of my favorites:
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Ouch.
Nowadays, it would be a de-motivation poster: Speechifying: It beats facing up to the yawning abyss.
Published in The Idler (September 1, 1759):
And, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (?):
Wait a minute. This is NOT a Johnson measuring contest? Length, girth and those such things?
Wow, how did he understand me so well?
(“Inveigh on Ricochet”!!!! It works, people, it works!!!)
What ever we hope to do with ease we may first learn to do with diligence.
___________
Dictated but not read.
Yrs. Truly etc.
But although he at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been preserved; but the greater part was consigned by him to the flames, a few days before his death.
Plainly he was a lazy man. And then he tried to destroy the record of his sloth.
Eric Hines
And, there’s this: Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Which strikes a chord, because I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
Eric Hines
My Dear Dr. Berlinski,
“It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.”
“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.”
“Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.”
Chappy Chanukah,
Jim
Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.
I see why you wouldn’t quote it here. My father, who wouldn’t have known Dr. Johnson from Magic Johnson, nevertheless quoted (some of) that line to me fairly often.
“How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cure.”
Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson
No, as to inflicting, on the other hand…
Oh, is that true.
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
(We should get rid of Claire Berlinski’s 11 tips and replace them with Dr. Johnson’s, shouldn’t we.)
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. ”
I don’t know what this means. Would someone please explain it to me?
I take it to mean — all those books, upon which every author has worked so arduously, for so long, dreaming of literary immortality … all of them, stacked up row after row, and most of them … never to be read.
The old Tory is suggesting that the truth about desire is not that its fulfilled, but that it’s desire.
Here’s the full quote:
William Blake was a very interesting man–it’s hard to square the author of Songs of Innocence and Jerusalem with the man who wrote An Island in the Moon.
He and Samuel Johnson provide some interesting contrasts in eighteenth-century attitudes towards science, religion and literature. They are two of my favorites.
And “that phrase” was quoted a lot around my house growing up, too.
There’s also all those fact and philosophy texts–a significant fraction of our knowledge and thinking. That part would seem to indicate that Johnson was at least partially wrong.
Or they might indicate our own _hubris_ in thinking so.
Eric Hines
“He might, perhaps, have studied more assiduously; but it may be doubted whether such a mind as his was not more enriched by roaming at large in the fields of literature than if it had been confined to any single spot… The flesh of animals who feed excursively, is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?”
Boswell’s Life of Johnson