[She was] a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant…
Whereas, Sir, you know courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.—Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel…
The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…
When people get together they are never silent for a moment. They will always talk. When you listen to what they say, a great deal of it is pointless. There is much harm and little…
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
I teach a course called Comparative Religion and Culture at Maryville University, and this past semester I was fortunate to be with Ajla Masinovic on Tuesdays and Thursdays. An engaged and insightful learner in each…
Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson There is no temper more unpropitious…
“This is the most sensible man that I ever say in my life.”—Mrs. Porter, on Dr. Johnson, quoted in W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson I live with the most sensible person I’ve ever seen in…
[Samuel Johnson] said, that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to; though, to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely…
No man can form a just estimate of his own powers by unactive speculation. That fortitude which has encountered no dangers, that prudence which has surmounted no difficulties, that integrity which has been attacked by…