Famous quotes containing the words samuel johnson, late, samuel and/or johnson:
“There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”
—Anonymous. quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, Feb. 1776 (1791)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)