Date: Saturday, July 7, 1750
"I think there is some reason for questioning whether the body and mind are not so proportioned, that the one can bear all that can be inflicted on the other, whether virtue cannot stand its ground as long as life, and whether a soul well principled will not be separated sooner than subdued."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Saturday, July 28, 1750
"Thus in time want is enlarged without bounds; an eagerness for increase of possessions deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulphs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750
"[T]hey seem always to be fully employed, or to be completely at ease without employment, to feel few intellectual miseries or pleasures, and to have no exuberance of understanding to lay out upon curiosity or caprice, but to have their minds exactly adapted to their bodies, with few other ideas ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750
"But the images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of rasure or of change."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750
"It ought, therefore, to be the care of those who wish to pass the last hours with comfort, to lay up such a treasure of pleasing ideas, as shall support the expenses of that time, which is to depend wholly upon the fund already acquired."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: August 13, 1750
"Beings conscious of a frame of mind originally diseased, as all the human race has cause to be, must use the regimen of a stricter self- government."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"The miser always imagines that there is a certain sum that will fill his heart to the brim; and every ambitious man, like king Pyrrhus, has an acquisition in his thoughts that is to terminate his labours, after which he shall pass the rest of his life in ease or gaiety, in repose or devotion."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"Sorrow is perhaps the only affection of the breast that can be expected from this general remark, and it therefore deserves the particular attention of those who have assumed the arduous province of preserving the balance of the mental constitution."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"The passions are diseases indeed, but they necessarily direct us to their proper cure."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"Yet it too often happens that sorrow, thus lawfully entering, gains such a firm possession of the mind, that it is not afterwards to be ejected; the mournful ideas, first violently impressed and afterwards willingly received, so much engross the attention, as to predominate in every thought, to ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)