Samuel Johnson Quotes About Literacy

• What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Success, Dance, Life And Love

  Samuel Johnson (1831). “The Lives of the English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works and Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons”, p.47

• A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

  Samuel Johnson

  Education, Reading, Men

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (entry for 14 July 1763)

• Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Men, Childhood

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.653

• When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Expression, Wish

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An essay on his life and genius”, p.349

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