The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.
Samuel Johnson Quotes
It is impossible to mingle in conversation without observing the difficulty with which a new name makes its way into the world. The first appearance of excellence unites multitudes against it; unexpected opposition rises up on every side; the celebrated and the obscure join in the confederacy; subtlety furnishes arms to impudence, and invention leads […]
The three persons in the Godhead are three in one sense and one in another. We cannot tell how – and that is the mystery.
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
It must be born with a man to be contented to take up with little things. Women have a great advantage that they may take up with little things, without disgracing themselves: a man cannot, except with fiddling. Had I learned to fiddle I should have done nothing else.
Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.
I have long wished that the Irish literature were cultivated. Ireland is known by tradition to have been once the seat of piety and learning; and surely it would be very acceptable to all those who are curious either in the original of nations, or the affinities of languages, to be further informed of the […]
The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir; the Irish are a fair people; – they never speak well of one another.
Who, when he saw the first sand or ashes by a casual intensiveness of heat melted into metalline form, rugged with excrescences and clouded with impurities, would have imagined that in this formless lump lay concealed so many conveniences of life as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world? […]
