Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful, and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own mistress, and his own patron.
–Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
The tribe is likewise very numerous of those who regulate their lives, not by the standard of religion, but the measure of other men’s virtue; who lull their own remorse with the remembrance of crimes more atrocious than their own, and seem to believe that they are not bad while another can be found worse.
–Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, #28
It is, indeed, not easy to tell how far we may be blinded by the love of ourselves, when we reflect how much a secondary passion can cloud our judgment, and how few faults a man, in the first raptures of love, can discover in the person or conduct of his mistress.
—-Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, #28
It is the pre-eminence of delusion and energetic self-destruction in human affairs that is the great theme of the Lives [of the Poets].
–Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing
