I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.
Interpretation
The quote acknowledges Millar's contributions to literature and the financial value he has added to it.
In this quote, Samuel Johnson expresses his admiration for Millar, recognizing that his work has not only enhanced the literary landscape but has also elevated the commercial worth of literature itself. This implies that Millar's efforts have allowed literature to gain greater respect and importance, suggesting that literary excellence can coexist with financial success.
In practice
During a book club meeting, to illustrate the impact of successful authors.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
We cannot always build a future for our youth, but we can always build our youth for the future.
I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.
The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
You cannot be an educator or a teacher without relating to children with full insight. Their urge to imitate has been transformed into a receptivity based on a natural and uncontested relationship of authority, and you must take this into account in the broadest possible sense.
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.
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