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.
Interpretation
Don't publicly express your worries; instead, work to overcome them quietly.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the importance of managing our emotions privately rather than externalizing them through complaints. By choosing to hide our anxieties and focusing on overcoming them, we can effectively diminish their hold on us and maintain a more positive demeanor in our lives.
In practice
During a team meeting where morale is low, you could say this quote to remind everyone to focus on solutions instead of complaints.
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.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.
To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don't need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
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