Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s line lands like a perfectly timed side-eye: wine, he admits, is excellent at improving your opinion of yourself, but useless at improving anyone else’s opinion of you. The joke is surgical because it doesn’t moralize about drunkenness in the usual clanging way. Instead it exposes the mechanism of alcohol as a self-administered PR campaign: confidence without credentials, glow without light.

The intent is less “don’t drink” than “don’t trust the feeling.” Johnson, an 18th-century master of social observation, knew how quickly conviviality becomes performance. In a culture of clubs, taverns, and conversation-as-sport, being “pleasing” wasn’t a soft virtue; it was social currency. Wine promises to raise your stock, but only in your own imagination. The subtext: intoxication is a private inflation that masquerades as public charm.

What makes it work is the balance of concession and correction. “Wine makes a man more pleased with himself” grants the drinker his experience - the warmth, the loosened tongue, the sudden sense of being brilliant. Then the follow-up clause snaps the illusion in half with a gentlemanly “I do not say...” It’s polite phrasing used as a scalpel, a rhetorical move that mirrors the social etiquette Johnson inhabited: never accuse directly when you can undercut conclusively.

There’s cynicism here, but it’s a useful kind. Johnson isn’t attacking pleasure; he’s puncturing vanity. The hangover, in his view, isn’t just physical - it’s the delayed receipt for thinking you were delightful when you were merely loud.