You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the importance of engaging personally with others, especially in teaching and relationships.
Samuel Johnson's quote highlights a common oversight in parenting and education: while one may impart knowledge or skills, such as teaching daughters about the planets, it is equally vital to foster personal connections. It suggests that if the relationship lacks warmth and engagement, the recipients of this knowledge may not appreciate or enjoy the company of the teacher, regardless of the information shared.
In practice
In a school presentation on the importance of emotional connections, I quoted Samuel Johnson.
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.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.
Although the teachers or the students are not the same, the person in charge of education is being formed or re-formed as he/she teaches, and the person who is being taught forms him/herself in the process. ...There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.
We don't care really about children as a society and television reflects that indifference to children as human beings.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.