Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
Interpretation
Quotations demonstrate respect and admiration for an author's work.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes that quoting someone is a recognition of their intellectual contribution and creativity. By using their words, one acknowledges the value of their ideas and expresses appreciation for the impact those ideas have had on them or on society at large.
In practice
In a lecture on literature, you could use this quote to discuss the importance of acknowledging sources.
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.
From my first year on the faculty, there was always so much more I wanted to impart to the students. I decided that, rather than waste the last day of class summarizing the semester, I'd spend my time talking about what I'd learned in life that was useful.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people.
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
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