Samuel Johnson on Writing
1709–1784 England
← All quotes by Samuel Johnson
6 quotes
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
The act of writing itself distracts the thoughts, and what is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.
The Idler (1758)
A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)
To make dictionaries is dull work.
I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
In every word of extenſive uſe, it was requiſite to mark the progreſs of its meaning, and ſhow by what gradations of intermediate ſenſe, it has paſſed from its primitive to its remote and accidental ſignification ; ſo that every foregoing explanation ſhould tend to that which follows, and the ſeries be regularly concantenated from the firſt notion to the laſt.