Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Interpretation
Dictionaries, like watches, have varying qualities, but some form is better than none.
Samuel Johnson's quote compares dictionaries to watches, suggesting that while the best dictionaries are not perfect, having a dictionary—albeit imperfect—is far better than having none at all. This highlights the value of knowledge and reference tools in education, stressing that even flawed resources can aid in understanding and learning.
In practice
Using this quote in a lecture about the importance of reference materials.
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.
And I’ve said this all across the country when I talk to parents about education, government has to fulfill its obligations to fund education, but parents have to do their job too. We’ve got to turn off the TV set, we’ve got to put away the video game, and we have to tell our children that education is not a passive activity, you have to be actively engaged in it. If we encourage that attitude and our community is enforcing it, I have no doubt we can compete with anybody in the world.
Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.
Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.
You can never learn less; you can only learn more.
Read the kinds of things you want to write; read the kinds of things you would never write. Learn something from every writer you read.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
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