Love Quote by Samuel Johnson

Affection, for Johnson, is never just a private feeling; it is a social instrument with consequences. "To love one that is great" turns admiration into a kind of moral apprenticeship. The line flatters the lover, yes, but it also disciplines them: if you choose your object well, your emotions become a ladder. Johnson is suggesting that greatness is contagious, or at least that proximity to it can elevate you by recalibrating your standards of taste, virtue, and ambition.

The sneaky brilliance is in "almost". He grants the uplift while refusing the cheap shortcut. Loving greatness doesn’t make you great; it makes you adjacent to it, warmed by the reflected heat. That qualifier protects the idea of merit - Johnson’s suspicion of vanity and unearned status is all over his work - while still acknowledging a truth about human psychology: we become what we consistently revere. Your attachments are an argument about who you want to be.

Read in the context of 18th-century Britain, where patronage, celebrity authorship, and social rank were tightly braided, the sentence also works as a subtle commentary on aspiration. If you can’t inherit power, you can attach yourself to it through loyalty, friendship, or intellectual devotion. Yet Johnson’s moralism keeps the move from sounding purely opportunistic. The love he’s endorsing is not fandom but veneration with standards: an affection that asks you to rise, not merely to bask.