Playing the game that Ed has sent coursing through the blogosphere like a virus, I picked up Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism, and came up with a veritable fortune cookie:
“The present life is to all a state of infelicity; every man, like an author, believes himself to merit more than he obtains, and solaces the present with the prospect of the future; others, indeed, suffer those disappointments in silence, of which the writer complains, to shew how well he has learnt the art of lamentation.”