Date: 1742
"My soul is dead, my heart is stone, / A cage of birds and beasts unclean, / A den of thieves, a dire abode / Of dragons, but no house of God."
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Date: 1742
"Carnal heart, immersed in sin, / All a cage of birds unclean!"
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Date: 1743
"My heart and flesh cry out for God: / There would I fix my soul's abode, / As birds that in the altars nest."
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Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750
"No man has ever been drawn to crimes by love or jealousy, envy or hatred, but he can tell how easily he might at first have repelled the temptation, how readily his mind would have obeyed a call to any other object, and how weak his passion has been after some casual avocation, till he has recal...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, March 12, 1751
"There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds, than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies, and detain them in a middle state, between the tediousness of total inactivity, and the fatigue of laborious efforts, enchant th...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1759
"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1762?
"My heart a cage of birds unclean, / Its old corrupt affections feels, / Its strong propensity to sin; / And God in me no longer dwells."
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Date: 1762
"That work of faith the novice blind / Would fain, on fancy's horse, leap o'er, / A shorter way to Zion find, / And fight with sin--when sin's no more."
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Date: 1779, 1781
"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seld...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)