Solitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, 'tis the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the easy vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can sooth, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared: he who buzzes in her ear at court, or at the opera, must be contented to buzz in vain. β¨ James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, p.256
More Author Quotes
- Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in di β¦ βΆ
- The appearance and retirement of actors are the great events of the theatrical world; and their first performances fill the pit with conjecture and prognostication, as the first actions of a new mona β¦ βΆ
- Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there bu β¦ βΆ
- The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive; and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and β¦ βΆ
- There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence. β¨ Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Cat β¦ βΆ
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