Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of changing one's environment to find oneself, rather than returning to negative influences.
Samuel Johnson's quote suggests that sometimes, to grow and improve, one must leave behind familiar and potentially harmful surroundings. By venturing into the unknown, a person can escape the negative perceptions or influences of their past and discover new opportunities and possibilities for personal development.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, you might say, 'As Samuel Johnson wisely noted, we should let ourselves go abroad to explore new opportunities.'
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.
From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values.
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
In 1986, Pakistan got the blasphemy law. So, while we had just two cases of blasphemy before that year, now we have thousands. It shows that one should be careful while bringing religion into legislation, because the law itself can become an instrument of persecution.
In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
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