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James Boswell Quotes about Character

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I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything.

I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything.

James Boswell
Life, Success, Character
'Boswell's London Journal' (ed. F. A. Pottle, 1950) 21 November 1762

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.

James Boswell
Character, Men, Drawing

[A]s a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.

James Boswell
Character, Men, Mirrors
James Boswell, John Wilson Crocker (1853). “Boswell's Life of Johnson: Including Their Tour to the Hebrides”, p.572

I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.

James Boswell
Death, Character, Funeral
James Boswell (2001). “Boswell's Edinburgh Journals 1767-1786”, Mercat Press Books

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

James Boswell
Hero, Character, Air
James Boswell, Marlies K. Danziger (1989). “Boswell, the great biographer, 1789-1795”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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