Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on Gratitude)

“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.”—English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

The image accompanying this post is a portrait of Dr. Johnson by his friend, the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on the Outcome to His Marriage Proposal)

“Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter: I have told her the worst of me; that I am that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money: and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, though she had not had a relation hanged, she had fifty who deserved hanging.”—British man of letters Samuel Johnson, explaining to his skeptical mother the astonishing denouement of his marriage proposal to a widow 25 years his senior, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1791)

Quote of the Day (Johnson, quoted by James Boswell)

“Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.”—Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1786)

(On this date in 1773, English literary lion Johnson and his younger Scottish friend Boswell embarked on a seven-week tour of northeast and northwest Scotland plus several of the islands in the Inner Hebrides. To me, this grand tour is all the more surprising given Johnson’s dislike for Scotland! Johnson’s account, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, published only two years after the trip, was derived largely from memory; Boswell’s, finished in 1786, was based on his contemporaneous notes. It's a forerunner of the epic life of Johnson, in all his quirky, brilliant humanity, that, when it appeared five years later, would revolutionize the art of biographies.)