An Essay On The Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson

Famous quotes containing the words samuel johnson, essay, life, genius and/or johnson:

“There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

“... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

“I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)

“Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)