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.
Interpretation
Neglecting friendships is unwise as it deprives us of valuable emotional support.
Samuel Johnson highlights the importance of nurturing friendships and warns against letting them fade due to negligence and silence. He views friendship as one of the greatest comforts in life's challenges, suggesting that actively maintaining these relationships is crucial for our emotional well-being and resilience.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of connections, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for maintaining friendships.
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.
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.
All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other... but to be with each other.
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.
You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core.
Strangers are family you haven't recognize yet
We've always had each other's backs in and out of competition. We support each other the most because we're the only ones that know what it's like to go through what we do, and so we can't be more thankful for each other. We're like sisters.
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