Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Motion, for Johnson, is not a metaphor but a moral necessity. The line refuses the fantasy of a fully “solved” life: even when your “real wants” are supplied, the engine still needs fuel, and that fuel is desire. Johnson’s shrewdness is in how he domesticates longing. He doesn’t romanticize it as inspiration or condemn it as vice; he frames it as maintenance. You can be comfortable and still need something to reach for, or you’ll calcify.

The phrasing “must admit” carries the hard-edged pragmatism of an 18th-century moralist who knew both poverty and melancholy. It’s not merely permissible to want more than necessities; it’s inevitable. “Those of fancy” is the telling concession: luxury, taste, projects, status, curiosities, the little inventions of the mind that keep a person oriented toward tomorrow. Johnson anticipates a modern insight about boredom and prosperity: when scarcity retreats, desire doesn’t disappear; it mutates. The consumer age would turn “fancy” into an industry, but Johnson is interested in the psychology underneath it.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to moral purity games. If you have the privilege of stability, you don’t get to posture as someone beyond wanting. The “real wants” being met doesn’t make you virtuous; it just moves the battleground inward, toward aspirations that can be noble (learning, art, improvement) or vain. Johnson’s subtext is blunt: the question isn’t whether you’ll desire, but what you’ll let desire do to you.