The Club Quotes

“You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried to in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“Not for nothing was Smith’s first book about moral philosophy. His concern, as Foley says, was the one that has haunted economic thinking ever since: “how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes.”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“An Irish clergyman was present at a dinner where someone asked what the greatest pleasure was, and Johnson replied, “Fucking.” He added that the second best was drinking, “and therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink, though not all could fuck.”47”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“There is no arguing with Johnson, for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“He liked to recall a statement the seventeenth-century diplomat William Temple made in retirement, that the gratifications of the public world are as nothing compared with “old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“Love is the fart Of every heart; It pains a man when ’tis kept close, And others doth offend when ’tis let loose.25”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

“So Stockdale asked Johnson, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “Do you really think that he deserves that illustrious theatrical character, and that prodigious fame, which he has acquired?” He hastened to report to Garrick what Johnson replied: “Oh, Sir, he deserves everything that he has acquired, for having seized the very soul of Shakespeare; for having embodied it in himself; and for having expanded its glory over the world.” Garrick exclaimed in tears, “Oh, Stockdale! Such praise from such a man! This atones for all that has passed.”53”
― Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age