Date: Tuesday, April 3, 1750

"He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind, which, having no tendency to one motion more than another, but as it is impelled by some external power, must always have recourse to foreign objects; or he must be afraid of the intrusio...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1750

"[T]hough I do not pretend to give laws to the legislators of mankind, or to limit the range of those powerful minds that carry light and heat through all the regions of knowledge, yet I have long thought, that the greatest part of those who lose themselves in studies by which I have not found th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, November 17, 1750

"He that without acquaintance with the power of desire, the cogency of distress, the complications of affairs, or the force of partial influence, has filled his mind with the excellence of virtue, and, having never tried his resolution in any encounters with hope or fear, believes it able to stan...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, December 13, 1750

"The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of t...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, March 5, 1751

"Having by several years of continual study treasured in my mind a great number of principles and ideas, and obtained by frequent exercise the power of applying them with propriety, and combining them with readiness, I resolved to quit the university, where I considered myself as a gem hidden in ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, January 8, 1751

"It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, February 5, 1751

"There are few books on which more time is spent by young students, than on treatises which deliver the characters of authors; nor any which oftener deceive the expectation of the reader, or fill his mind with more opinions which the progress of his studies and the increase of his knowledge oblig...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, December 21, 1751

"A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened in...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: February 4, 1752

"When we are employed in reading a great and good Author, we ought to consider ourselves as searching after Treasures, which, if well and regularly laid up in the Mind, will be of use to us on sundry Occasions in our Lives."

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: Saturday, January 25, 1752

"Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other; an effusion of wit, therefore, presupposes an accumulation of knowledge; a memory stored with notions, which the imagination may cull out to compose ne...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)