137. Novelty "Nothing odd will do long. 'Tristram Shandy' did not last." Boswell: Life Link 296. Appropriateness; Novelty "All infidel writers drop into oblivion, when personal connections and the floridness of novelty are gone; though now and then a foolish fellow, who thinks he can be witty upon them, may bring them again into notice. There will sometimes start up a College joker, who does not consider that what is a joke in a College will not do in the world." Boswell: Life Link 360. Novelty; Poverty "Novelty always has some power, an unaccustomed mode of begging excites an unaccustomed degree of pity." Johnson: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland Link 1,051. Familiarity; Novelty On Paradise Lost: "We all, indeed, feel the effects of Adam's disobedience; we all sin like Adam, and like him must all bewail our offences; we have restless and insidious enemies in the fallen angels, and in the blessed spirits we have guardians and friends; in the Redemption of mankind we hope to be included: in the description of heaven and hell we are surely interested, as we are all to reside hereafter either in the regions of horrour or of bliss. "But these truths are too important to be new: they have been taught to our infancy; they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar conversation, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life. Being therefore not new they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind: what we knew before we cannot learn; what is not unexpected, cannot surprise." Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets) Link 1,072. Action/Inaction; Effort; Fear; Novelty "There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies, and detain them in a middle state, between the tediousness of total inactivity and the fatigue of laborious efforts, enchant them at once with ease and novelty, and vitiate them with the luxury of learning. The necessity of doing something and the fear of undertaking much sink the historian to a genealogist, the philosopher to a journalist of the weather, and the mathematician to a constructor of dials." Johnson: Rambler #103 (March 12, 1751) Link 1,816. Credulity; Novelty; Skepticism "Every novelty appears more wonderful as it is more remote from any thing with which experience or testimony has hitherto acquainted us; and if it passes further beyond the notions that we have been accustomed to form, it becomes at last incredible." Johnson: Idler #87 (December 15, 1759) Link