Samuel Johnson on being reminded

In 1750, while he was working on his dictionary, Johnson began The Rambler, a paper of essays that came out every Tuesday and Saturday. The second issue is about our habit of living in the future. We are never satisfied with what is in front of us, he says; “the natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” Hope gets hard things started, he grants, but it can also let us enjoy imagined success “till the time of obtaining it has slipped away.”

No one, he goes on, needs this warning more than authors, who picture the fame their work will bring. So, as he starts his own paper, Johnson tries to “fortify” himself by thinking about the worst that can happen to a writer: “There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect.” He lists the reasons a good book can go unread. Some readers won’t look at anything “till its reputation is established”; others are too envious to help. And “what is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

So the line began as one reason a book that says familiar things gets ignored. Johnson took it seriously, though. The next issue opens: “The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them.”

Most of the time, we don’t fail to do the right thing because we don’t know what it is. We know we should be patient, keep our promises and not waste the day. We forget, or we know it the way we know a fact we never use.

Johnson knew this from his own life. His private prayers and diaries, published after his death as Prayers and Meditations, return year after year to the same resolutions: “To rise early.” “To keep a journal.” “To oppose laziness by doing what is to be done to-morrow.” At Easter in 1765 he admitted, “I often lie till two.” On his birthday in 1766 he wrote out his purposes for the year ahead; under them is a note dated 3 October: “Of all this I have done nothing.” Knowing better didn’t stop him from breaking them, and he kept writing them down anyway.

That is why the same few truths need to come back to us, often and at the right moments. New advice feels like progress, and a reminder can feel like a waste of time because we’ve “heard it before.” Johnson’s point is that hearing it before is not the same as living by it.

English writer and lexicographer, 1709–1784

Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 above his father’s bookshop in Lichfield, England, and died in London in 1784. After nine years’ work, with a few assistants copying out the quotations he marked in books, he published A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was the most used English dictionary for the next 150 years, until the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.

While working on the dictionary, he wrote The Rambler, essays that came out every Tuesday and Saturday from March 1750 and sold for twopence each. There were 208 of them, often on moral and religious questions and more serious than the title suggests. He later edited Shakespeare’s plays (1765) and wrote Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). His friend James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) was called by the Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature.”

All quotes from Samuel Johnson

It comes from The Rambler, No. 2, 24 March 1750.

The full passage:

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

We matched the quote word for word against the Project Gutenberg text of The Rambler, No. 2. Johnson wrote it as the end of a longer sentence ("…it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed"), so the quote here starts at "men", with a capital letter. The issue is dated "March 24, 1749-50". England's legal year began on 25 March until 1752, so dates between January and March were often written with both years. By today's reckoning, it was 1750. We last checked this on 30 October 2026.

• The Rambler, Nos. 2 and 3, in The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2 (Project Gutenberg, from the 1825 Oxford edition)
• Samuel Johnson, Prayers and Meditations, ed. Hinchcliffe Higgins (Internet Archive), for his resolutions
• Samuel Johnson (Wikipedia), for when and how The Rambler appeared
• Old Style and New Style dates (Wikipedia), for the 1749-50 date