Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s advice is a slap across the wrist of vanity disguised as a craft tip. “When you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine” doesn’t mean “good writing” so much as “writing you’re emotionally attached to.” He’s targeting the line that feels like a personal triumph: the sentence you can hear yourself performing, the metaphor you’d quote in an interview, the flourish that turns the writer into an admirer of his own cleverness. Strike it out not because beauty is suspect, but because self-satisfaction is.

The subtext is brutally moralistic in that very Johnsonian way: style is character. If you keep the showiest line, you’re likely keeping it for the wrong reason - to be seen rather than to be understood. Johnson, a critic with a lexicographer’s respect for clarity and a satirist’s allergy to pretense, is warning that the “particularly fine” passage often functions like decorative frosting: it announces talent while distracting from thought.

Context matters. Johnson is writing in an 18th-century world where prose was expected to carry argument, judgment, and public consequence, not just vibe. “Fine” can also mean mannered, artificially elevated - the kind of rhetorical perfume that signals class and learning. His edit isn’t anti-eloquence; it’s anti-display. The line still lands because it captures an enduring trap: writers don’t just draft ideas, they draft identities. Johnson’s cure is ruthless revision as ego-control, a reminder that the work isn’t there to flatter the author; it’s there to do its job.