Notes to Shakespeare Quotes

“Every man adheres as long as he can to his own pre-conceptions.”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies

“The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical.”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies

“Judgement, like other faculties, is improved by practice, and its advancement is hindered by submission to dictatorial decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the use of a table book.”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies

“The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress. Thus sometimes truth and errour, and sometimes contrarieties of errour, take each others place by reciprocal invasion. The tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren; the sudden meteors of intelligence which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their lustre, and leave mortals again to grope their way. These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions to which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed; since they are not escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may surely be endured with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank themselves but as the satellites of their authours”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies

“so easily is he praised, whom no man can envy.”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies

“those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right;”
― Samuel Johnson, Notes to Shakespeare:The Comedies and Tragedies