Samuel Johnson Quotes About Libraries

• A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Writing, Men

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 6 Apr. 1775)

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Inspirational, Teaching, Learning

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 18 Apr. 1775)

• The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Time, Powerful, Book

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 6 Apr. 1775)

• No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wall, Writing, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.167

• To exact of every man who writes that he should say something new, would be to reduce authors to a small number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say only what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped for ever with the same thoughts differently expressed, than with the same books differently decorated.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Writing, Men

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

• No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

  Samuel Johnson

  Hope, Vanity, Expectations

  'The Rambler' no. 106 (23 March 1751)

• Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.

  Samuel Johnson

  Lying, Book, Library

  Samuel Johnson (1818). “A Dictionary Of The English Language; In Which The Words Are Deduced From Their Originals; And Illustrated In Their Different Significations, By Examples From The Best Writers: Together With A History of the Language, and an English Grammar”, p.7

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