182. Conversation; Diversion; Stimulation "You hunt in the morning (says he), and crowd to the public rooms at night, and call it diversion; when your heart knows it is perishing with poverty of pleasures, and your wits get blunted for want of some other mind to sharpen them upon. There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation; and whoever has once experienced the full flow of London talk, when he retires to country friendships and rural sports, must either be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for want of his usual food." Piozzi: Anecdotes Link 260. London; Stimulation I mentioned to him that I had become very weary in a company where I heard not a single intellectual sentence, except "that a man who had been settled ten years in Minorca was become a much inferiour man to what he was in London, because a man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place." Johnson: "A man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place, whose mind is enlarged only because he has lived in a large place: but what is got by books and thinking is preserved in a narrow place as well as in a large place. A man cannot know modes of life as well in Minorca as in London; but he may study mathematicks as well in Minorca." Boswell: Life Link 1,114. Society; Stimulation; Variety "Long confinement to the same company, which perhaps similitude of taste first brought together, quickly contracts his faculties, and makes a thousand things offensive that are in themselves indifferent: a man accustomed to hear only the echo of his own sentiments, soon bars all the common avenues of delight, and has no part in the general gratification of mankind." Johnson: Rambler #112 (April 13, 1751) Link