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.
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."
It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral society - not a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.