The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume 6

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Page 20 - This modest stone, what few vain marbles can, May truly say, Here lies an honest man : A Poet, blest beyond the Poet's fate, Whom Heaven kept sacred from the Proud and Great : Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease, Content with science in the vale of peace. Calmly he look'd on either life, and here Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear ; From Nature's...
Page 21 - Venus, take my votive glass, Since I am not what I was , What from this day I shall be, Venus let me never see.
Page 384 - OUCH is the emptiness of human enjoyment, ^ that we are always impatient of t;he present. Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust ; and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to every other course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last.
Page 166 - You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry " Hold, hold !
Page 107 - CRITICISM, though dignified from the earliest ages by the labours of men eminent for knowledge and sagacity, and, since the revival of polite literature, the favourite study of European scholars, has not yet attained the certainty and ) stability of science.
Page 216 - Wood, which he firmly believed to be of the first edition, and, by the help of which, the text might be freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to such favours from him.
Page 393 - I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous author to write, as if he expected to be hereafter known. I am willing to flatter myself with hopes, that, by collecting these papers, I am not preparing, for my future life, either shame or repentance.
Page 83 - It is however certain that no estimate is more in danger of / erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes / the force of his own genius.
Page 99 - Shakspeare, we ought perhaps to pay new honours to that transcendent and unbounded genius that could preside over the passions in sport; who, to actuate the affections, needed not the slow gradation of common means, but could fill the heart with instantaneous jollity or sorrow, and vary our disposition as he changed his scenes.
Page 121 - We are by our occupations, education, and habits of life, divided almost into different species, which regard one another, for the most part, with scorn and malignity.

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