Samuel Johnson Quote of the Week from Greg Bover

“If you are idle, be not solitary. If you are solitary, be not idle.”

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Dr. Johnson was the most important English literary figure of his age. He wrote plays, essays and poems including the deeply perceptive “Vanity of Human Wishes,” but he was best known for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), an almost incomprehensible feat of solo scholarship, written in just nine years, and the first to feature examples, largely from Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton, of 114,000 words in a literary context. Johnson was also the subject of one of the most famous biographies ever written, the minutely detailed Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell. It is from this biography and other descriptions of the tics and outbursts of the good Doctor that it is now thought that he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, a condition not yet defined in his time. Johnson is also credited with the observation that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Greg Bover