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)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, September 4, 1750
"But it must be strongly impressed upon our minds that virtue is not to be pursued as one of the means to fame, but fame to be accepted as the only recompense which mortals can bestow on virtue; to be accepted with complacence, but not sought with eagerness."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)