Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Interpretation
Curiosity and leisure can lead to significant knowledge, but distractions often get in the way.
This quote by Samuel Johnson highlights the importance of leisure and curiosity as essential drives for acquiring useful knowledge. However, he points out that these noble pursuits are frequently hindered by trivial tasks and competition that divert attention from the deeper explorations of knowledge and understanding.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of lifelong learning, one might quote this to emphasize the need for curiosity over trivial concerns.
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.
I had great mentors in my parents who always sought to understand the world around them. And they would push me to really think things through.
Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
There's no media training. In cooking school, there's not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.
Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
I want to use television not only to entertain, but to help people lead better lives.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
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