Chef Mojo

Your Daily Johnson

It is no less a proof of eminence to have many enemies than many friends.

Samuel Johnson
Rambler #10 (April 21, 1750)

Your Daily Johnson

He that has abilities to conceive perfection will not easily be content without it; and, since perfection cannot be reached, will lose the opportunity of doing well in the vain hope of unattainable excellence.

Samuel Johnson
Rambler #134 (June 29, 1751)

Your Daily Johnson

Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations for seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and finding it late, have bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist. No, Sir, I wish him to drive on.

Samuel Johnson
James Boswell: Life of Johnson

Your Daily Johnson

As people who have the same inclination generally flock together, every trifler is kept in countenance by the sight of others as unprofitably active as himself; by kindling the heat of competition, he in time thinks himself important, and by having his mnind intensely engaged, he is secured from weariness of himself.

Samuel Johnson
Adventurer #128 (January 26, 1754)

Your Daily Johnson

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.

Samuel Johnson
James Boswell: Life of Johnson

Your Daily Johnson

I happened to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, "I hope in the high-way. I have been looking at his reformations.

James Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Your Daily Johnson

Boswel, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content.

Samuel Johnson
Letter to Hester Thrale (September 21, 1773)

Your Daily Johnson

The commercial world is very frequently put into confusion by the bankruptcy of merchants, that assumed the splendour of wealth only to obtain the privilege of trading with the stock of other men, and of contracting debts which nothing but lucky casualties could enable them to pay; till after having supported their appearance a while by tumultuary magnificence of boundless traffic, they sink at once, and drag down into poverty those whom their equipages had induced to trust them.

Samuel Johnson
Rambler #189 (January 7, 1752)

Your Daily Johnson

But to the particular species of excellence men are directed, not by an ascendant planet or predominating humour, but by the first book which they read, some early conversation which they heard, or some accident which excited ardour and emulation.

Samuel Johnson
Pope (Lives of the Poets)

Your Daily Johnson

We are all offended by low terms, but are not disgusted alike by the same compositions, because we do not agree to censure the same terms as low. No word is naturally or intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words, as of other things arbitrarily and capriciously established, depends wholly upon accident and custom. The cottager thinks those apartments splendid and spacious which an inhabitant of palaces will despise for their inelegance; and to him who has passed most of his hours with the delicate and polite, many expressions will seem sordid which another, equally acute, may hear without offence; but a mean term never fails to displease him to whom it appears mean, as poverty is certainly and invariably despised, though he who is poor in the eyes of some, may by others be envied for his wealth.

Samuel Johnson
Rambler #168 (October 26, 1751)