An Essay On The Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson

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

“It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)

“Essay writing is perhaps ... the easiest for the author and requires little more than what is called a fluency of words and a vivacity of expression to avoid dullness; but without ... a real foundation of matter ... an essay writer is very apt, like Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, to think that if he had the tediousness of a king, he would bestow it all upon his readers.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)

“Yet come to me in dreams that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)

“The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

“appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.”
—Bible: Hebrew, 1 Samuel 8:5.

Leaders of ancient Israel asking the last of the judges, Samuel, to appoint a king.

“So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)