Samuel Johnson: Celebrated lexicographer's 10 finest quotes and witticisms

Today's Google Doodle raises a dish of tea to the man who said, 'Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both'

Dr Samuel Johnson (Rex)

Today’s Google Doodle marks what would have been the 308th birthday of Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), a giant of English literature in every sense.

Johnson remains best known for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), compiled by “the sage of Lichfield” entirely unaided over a nine-year period. Approached to write this epic tome by a group of prominent London booksellers including Robert Dodsley and Thomas Longman, Johnson was paid 1,500 guineas (about £220,000 in modern money) and set about the task with relish, meticulously gathering quotations to support his definitions.

The resulting work contains 42,733 entries over 2,300 pages and remains a colossal achievement, revered to this day and famed for its numerous droll comic touches. The word “lexicographer”, for instance, is defined as “a harmless drudge”, while “oats” is said to denote “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

The great man remained a prodigious writer throughout his life, publishing periodicals, poems, biographies and one philosophical novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), widely read during the Enlightenment.

Beyond the dictionary, the most famous work associated with Johnson’s name remains his friend James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), a posthumously printed biography faithfully recording his wit and wisdom in exhaustive detail. It is to Boswell that we owe the preservation of many of this extraordinary orator’s fine words and bon mots, typically uttered in the company of the capital’s leading lights, Johnson counting portrait painter and Royal Academy founder Joshua Reynolds, actor David Garrick, politician Edmund Burke and comic playwright Oliver Goldsmith amongst his social circle.

Here we present a selection of Dr Johnson’s most celebrated aphorisms and sayings, many of which have entered the common parlance.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Johnson was a great advocate for London and lived happily at 17 Gough Square off Fleet Street for many years with his wife Elizabeth “Tetty” Johnson and their cat Hodge. The house, just yards from The Cheshire Cheese, his tavern of choice, is now a museum dedicated to Dr Johnson’s memory.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

“The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!” Johnson was notorious for the joshing derision he displayed towards Scots, as demonstrated by the aforementioned dictionary definition or such assertions as, “Knowledge was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town.” Boswell, a proud Highlander, sought to correct the prejudice and took Johnson to visit, a journey recorded in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1775)

“A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.”

“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”

“Tea amuses the evening, solaces the midnight, and welcomes the morning.” Johnson’s extraordinary output can in part be attributed to his positively heroic consumption of tea, a beverage with which he was infatuated, claiming to drink as many as 25 cups of an evening.

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Johnson suffered from ill health throughout his life, beset by scrofula, gout and fits of depression. His melancholy often gave rise to misanthropy as indicated by the following observation: “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.” The above remark incidentally provides the epigraph to Hunter Thompson’s classic gonzo odyssey Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”