Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Treating your adversary with respect,” he told Boswell, presumably with a twinkle in his eyes, “is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.”
“supported with impatience and quitted with reluctance.”
“Men hate more sturdily than they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.”
“no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”
He called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,”
Submission is the duty of the ignorant, and content the virtue of the poor.”
“So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.”
When we consider in abstracted speculation the unequal distribution of the pleasures of life, … when it is apparent that many want the necessaries of nature, and many more the comforts and conveniences of life; that the idle live at ease by the fatigues of the diligent, and the luxurious are pampered with delicacies untasted by those who supply them; … when the greater number must always want [lack] what the smaller are enjoying and squandering without use; it seems impossible to conceive that the peace of society can long subsist; it were natural to expect that’no man would be left long in
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All theory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.”
Voltaire and Rousseau seemed to him two varieties of imbecile: Voltaire an intellectual fool, Rousseau a sentimental fool; but the difference between them was so slight that it was “difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.”
He pronounced life painful and worthless, but, like most of us, he prolonged it as much as he could, and faced with angry reluctance his declining years.
Johnson’s preface as “perhaps the finest composition in our language.”
“Do it again,” he said, “and let us see who will tire first.”
Johnson had thought of writing “little lives”; he forgot that one of the laws of composition is that a pen in motion, like matter in Newton’s first law, continues in motion unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it from without.
There is a secret pride in surviving our contemporaries, but we are punished with loneliness.
He was the strangest figure in literary history, stranger even than Scarron or Pope.
No one received so much adulation and gave so little praise.
We might compare him with Socrates, who also talked at the slightest provocation, and is remembered for his spoken words. Both were stimulating gadflies, but Socrates asked questions and gave no answers, Johnson asked no questions and answered all. Socrates was certain about nothing, Johnson was certain about everything. Both appealed to science to leave the stars alone and study man. Socrates faced death like a philosopher and with a smile; Johnson faced it with religious tremors rivaling his enervating pains.
He was not designed for beauty, but he served to frighten some of us out of cant, hypocrisy, and gush, and to make us look at ourselves with fewer delusions about the nature of man or the ecstasies of freedom.
he “would not cut off Johnson’s claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.”
France loved him, even to his death and beyond, for it was Paris, not France, that guillotined him in 1793.
The city populace did not read him, but it agreed with him.
The minister had no time, the King had no money, to bring these ideas to fulfillment.
“He had the head of Francis Bacon and the heart of L’Hôpital.”
Philosophy for once agreed with diplomacy: the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, and a hundred others had prepared the French mind to support colonial as well as intellectual liberation, and many American leaders—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson—were sons of the French Enlightenment.
In 1724, not yet nineteen, he went to England; he worked as a printer, published a defense of atheism,98 returned to Philadelphia and deism, married, joined the Freemasons, and won international renown as inventor and scientist.
the admirers of ancient Rome saw in him Cincinnatus, Scipio Africanus, and both Catos, all reborn.
He realized that he was a Protestant, a deist, and a republican seeking help from a Catholic country and a pious King.
The war was popular with almost every Frenchman except Necker.
The French government was made bankrupt by the war, and that bankruptcy led to the Revolution.
“The Americans seemed to have executed what our writers had conceived.”
It was a brave hara-kiri. France gave money and blood to America, and received in return a new and powerful impulse to freedom.
Books like Émile were still banned and burned, but their ashes helped to disseminate their ideas.
Liberty is a strong food, but it needs a stout digestion....
Rousseau, said Mme. de Staël, “invented nothing, but he set everything on fire.”
They sought solitude and fondled their egos.
Reason seems to have no moral sense; it will labor to defend any desire, however corrupt. Something else is needed—an inborn consciousness of right and wrong; and even this conscience has to be warmed with feeling if it is to engender virtue and make not a clever calculator but a good man.
When the revolutionists made France a republic they did so in terms not of the French philosophers but of Plutarch’s Greek and Roman heroes; their idol was not Ferney but Sparta and republican Rome.
Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson had been molded to free thought by the philosophes. Through those American sons of the French Enlightenment, republican theories graduated into a government victorious in arms, recognized by a French King, and proceeding to establish a constitution indebted in some measure to Montesquieu.
The secular clergy prospered in the sees and languished in the parishes.
Most previous revolutions had been against the state or the Church, rarely against both at once.
Is it any wonder that for a decade France went mad?
The growth of wealth enabled men to finance sins that had been too costly before.
Readers were shocked less by de Sade’s amoralism than by his suggestion that the total destruction of the human race would afflict the cosmos so little that “it would no more interrupt its course than if the entire species of rabbits or hares were extinguished.”
She compared him to Montaigne, “and this is the highest praise I could give you, for I find no mind as just or as clear as his.”
“My poor tutor,” she asked Walpole, “have you met only monsters, crocodiles, and hyenas? As for me I see only fools, idiots, liars, envious and sometimes perfidious people.
people do not care to play chess on the edge of a precipice.”
“Man, in the actual state of society, seems more corrupted by his reason than by his passions.”
“Women give to friendship only what they borrow from love,”
“love, such as it exists in society, is nothing but an exchange of fantasies and the contact of two skins [contact de deux épidermes]
