Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, n/d
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson from Johnsonian Miscellanies, Vol. II
Showing posts with label Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Johnson. Show all posts
29 July 2026
16 July 2026
Happy Birthday, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1769
In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, born on this day in 1723, from Discourses
16 May 2026
18 September 2025
Happy Birthday, Samuel Johnson
Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies — alas! how soon he dies!
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies — alas! how soon he dies!
Samuel Johnson, born on this day in 1709
19 April 2025
08 March 2025
20 October 2024
05 October 2024
05 May 2024
23 March 2024
Laudable.
Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1769
Some degree of self-approbation is always the reward of diligence; and I cannot, therefore, but consider the laborious cultivation of petty pleasures, as a more happy and more virtuous disposition, than that universal contempt and haughty negligence, which is sometimes associated with powerful faculties, but is often assumed by indolence when it disowns its name, and aspires to the appellation of greatness of mind.
It has been long observed, that drollery and ridicule is the most easy kind of wit: let it be added that contempt and arrogance is the easiest philosophy. To find some objection to every thing, and to dissolve in perpetual laziness under pretense that occasions are wanting to call forth activity, to laugh at those who are ridiculously busy without setting an example of more rational industry, is no less in the power of the meanest than of the highest intellects.
Our present state has placed us at once in such different relations, that every human employment, which is not a visible and immediate act of goodness, will be in some respect or other subject to contempt; but it is true, likewise, that almost every act, which is not directly vicious, is in some respect beneficial and laudable. "I often," says Bruyere, "observe from my window, two beings of erect form and amiable countenance, endowed with the powers of reason, able to clothe their thoughts in language, and convey their notions to each other. They rise early in the morning, and are every day employed till sunset in rubbing two smooth stones together, or, in other terms, in polishing marble."
Samuel Johnson, from The Adventurer
01 December 2023
29 October 2023
Happy Birthday, Boswell
Willison, James Boswell, 1765
Every man should keep minutes of whatever he reads. Every circumstance of his studies should be recorded; what books he has consulted; how much of them he has read; at what times; how often the same authors; and what opinions he formed of them, at different periods of his life. Such an account would much illustrate the history of his mind.
James Boswell, born on this day in 1740, paraphrasing Voltaire in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
16 July 2023
Strength.
Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1769
We feared pain much earlier than we apprehended guilt, and were delighted with the sensations of pleasure, before we had capacities to be charmed with the beauty of rectitude. To this power, thus early established, and incessantly increasing, it must be remembered that almost every man has, in some part of his life, added new strength by a voluntary or negligent subjection of himself; for who is there that has not instigated his appetites by indulgence, or suffered them, by an unresisting neutrality, to enlarge their dominion, and multiply their demands?
Samuel Johnson
31 December 2022
18 September 2022
24 June 2022
Together.
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
07 June 2022
20 February 2022
Born.
Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, 1862
LIBERTY
On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sands of snow
I write your name
On the pages I have read
On all the white pages
Stone, blood, paper or ash
I write your name
On the images of gold
On the weapons of the warriors
On the crown of the king
I write your name
On the jungle and the desert
On the nest and on the brier
On the echo of my childhood
I write your name
On all my scarves of blue
On the moist sunlit swamps
On the living lake of moonlight
I write your name
On the fields, on the horizon
On the birds’ wings
And on the mill of shadows
I write your name
On each whiff of daybreak
On the sea, on the boats
On the demented mountaintop
I write your name
On the froth of the cloud
On the sweat of the storm
On the dense rain and the flat
I write your name
On the flickering figures
On the bells of colors
On the natural truth
I write your name
On the high paths
On the deployed routes
On the crowd-thronged square
I write your name
On the lamp which is lit
On the lamp which isn’t
On my reunited thoughts
I write your name
On a fruit cut in two
Of my mirror and my chamber
On my bed, an empty shell
I write your name
On my dog, greathearted and greedy
On his pricked-up ears
On his blundering paws
I write your name
On the latch of my door
On those familiar objects
On the torrents of a good fire
I write your name
On the harmony of the flesh
On the faces of my friends
On each outstretched hand
I write your name
On the window of surprises
On a pair of expectant lips
In a state far deeper than silence
I write your name
On my crumbled hiding-places
On my sunken lighthouses
On my walls and my ennui
I write your name
On abstraction without desire
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
And for the want of a word
I renew my life
For I was born to know you
To name you
Liberty.
Paul Eluard
29 October 2021
08 October 2021
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