“[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.”
Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 10
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Samuel Johnson 362
English writer 1709–1784Related quotes

No. 191
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

“On Philosophy: To Dorothea,” in Theory as Practice (1997), p. 420
Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 93.
Context: A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

Preface to Lear (1972; London: Methuen, 1983) p. lvii

Letter to his son, Charles Carter Lee, as quoted in R.E.Lee: A Biography (1934) by Douglas Southall Freeman, Vol. I, p.32.

Remarks to the National Association of Home Builders, October 2, 2004 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041002-7.html
2000s, 2004