James Boswell
FameRank: 4

"James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck", was a Scottish people/Scottish lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh. He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which the modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language.

Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes affectionately says of Doctor Watson/Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales, "I am lost without my Boswell."

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous lawyers! More James Boswell on Wikipedia.

I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.

258

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

197

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.

196

He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

169

A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.

165

I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home.

164

A Sceptick therefore, who because he finds that Truths are not universally received, doubts of their existence, is just as foolish as a man who should try large shoes upon little feet, and little shoes upon large feet, and finding that they did not f.

163

The man who stops making new friends eventually will have none.

161

I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything.

108

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

95