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.
How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.
When I am silent, I have thunder hidden inside.
A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.
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