Walter Raleigh Quotes

The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature.

The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.

I wish I loved the human Race,
I wish I loved its silly face,
I wish I liked the way it walks,
I wish I liked the way it talks,
And when I'm introduced to one,
I wish I thought "what jolly fun"!

The late Mr. Froude, with a poet's instinct for unity, chose to regard the whole story of the English Voyages as an aspect of the Protestant Reformation.

Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare; but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into professing a distant admiration for Paradise Lost, have paid their last and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.

A reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnson's most whimsical and irresponsible remarks. But he must have omitted or neglected by far the greater number. Those that he has preserved are perhaps the most delightful and convincing things in his book.

Of all the notable Elizabethans, Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps the most difficult to understand. He has the insolent imagination of Marlowe, and the profound melancholy of Donne.