Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
Interpretation
Men often fail to critically examine their own biases, especially those that benefit them.
This quote by Samuel Johnson highlights the tendency of individuals to overlook their own prejudices, particularly when these biases work in their favor. It suggests that self-reflection and honest assessment of oneβs beliefs and biases is a difficult yet necessary task in the pursuit of personal growth and understanding. By acknowledging our prejudices, we can cultivate a more genuine perspective and foster greater empathy toward others.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing personal biases.
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 am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.
The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I'm bloated with language I canβt afford to forget.
A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.