As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a shift in the speaker's expectations of people as they gain more understanding of humanity.
Samuel Johnson suggests that as one learns more about human nature and the imperfections that come with it, their standards for what constitutes a 'good man' become more lenient. This indicates a deeper acceptance of humanity's flaws and a recognition that goodness can take many forms.
In practice
In a discussion about human behavior during a psychology class.
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.
All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
He (the sage) wants all things to follow their own nature, but dares not act.
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Everything in-between is a gift.
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
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