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.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
Teaching players during practices was what coaching was all about to me.
I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.
There is so much potential out there in young people and they aren't getting the right information or being encouraged in the right ways. This is our duty as a society.
My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.
To read great books does not mean one becomes βbookishβ; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
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