He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
Interpretation
Pursuing wealth or power can lead to a loss of integrity and bravery if one fails.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the moral risks associated with the relentless pursuit of wealth and power. When an individual strives towards these goals but falls short, they may compromise their values, such as honesty and courage, to cope with their perceived failures, suggesting that the quest for such ambitions can corrupt one's character.
In practice
In a motivational speech about integrity in business practices.
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.
Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.
I realize that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.
One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
Old things are always in good repute, present things in disfavor.
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