' BOSWELL. 'I think, Sir, you once
said to me, that not to drink wine was a great deduction from life.'
JOHNSON. 'It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say
a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational.'
BOSWELL. 'But if we could have pleasure always, should not we be
happy? The greatest part of men would compound for pleasure.' JOHNSON.
'Supposing we could have pleasure always, an intellectual man would not
compound for it. The greatest part of men would compound, because the
greatest part of men are gross.'
I mentioned to him that I had become very weary in a company where I
heard not a single intellectual sentence, except that 'a man who had
been settled ten years in Minorca was become a much inferiour man to
what he was in London, because a man's mind grows narrow in a narrow
place.' JOHNSON. 'A man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place, whose
mind is enlarged only because he has lived in a large place: but what is
got by books and thinking is preserved in a narrow place as well as in
a large place.
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