Life of Johnson - Boswell

When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, 'Not at all, Sir.  On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.'

On my observing to him that a certain gentleman had remained silent the whole evening, in the midst of a very brilliant and learned society, "Sir, (said he,) the conversation overflowed, and drowned him."

'Well, let me tell you, (said Goldsmith,) when my tailor brought home my bloom-coloured coat, he said, "Sir, I have a favour to beg of you.  When any body asks you who made your clothes, be pleased to mention John Filby, at the Harrow, in Waterlane."'  JOHNSON.  'Why, Sir, that was because he knew the strange colour would attract crowds to gaze at it, and thus they might hear of him, and see how well he could make a coat even of so absurd a colour.'

'A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

BOSWELL.  'Is it wrong then, Sir, to affect singularity, in order to make people stare?'  JOHNSON.  'Yes, if you do it by propagating errour: and, indeed, it is wrong in any way.  There is in human nature a general inclination to make people stare; and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself.  If you wish to make people stare by doing better than others, why, make them stare till they stare their eyes out.  But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd.  I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes.  You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who

had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap.  Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run after him.'

One of the company not being come at the appointed hour, I proposed, as usual upon such occasions, to order dinner to be served; adding, 'Ought six people to be kept

waiting for one?'  'Why, yes, (answered Johnson, with a delicate humanity,) if the one will suffer more by your sitting down, than the six will do by waiting.'

There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing on the fiddle.  In all other things we can do something at first.  Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably.  A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.'

What is Wrong With the World G. K. Chesterton

You can only knock off the King's head once.  But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite.

There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry after all What is essential to our right thinking is this: that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic occurrences recurring alternatively forever... One is a means and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken.  But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg.  He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.

Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence. Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics.