Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.
Samuel Johnson Quotes
A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write.
Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity (in a library), most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered, and owed the honors which they once obtained, not to judgment or to genius, to labour or to art, but to the prejudice of faction, the strategems of intrigue, […]
To judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them. That which is easy at one time was difficult at another.
Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.
He that finds his knowledge narrow, and his arguments weak, and by consequence his suffrage not much regarded, is sometimes in hope of gaining that attention by his clamours which he cannot otherwise obtain, and is pleased with remembering that at last he made himself heard, that he had the power to interrupt those whom […]
Here falling houses thunder on your head, And here a female atheist talks you dead.
Every art is best taught by example. Nothing contributes more to the cultivation of propriety than remarks on the works of those who have most excelled.
Round numbers are always false.
