Round numbers are always false.
Interpretation
Round numbers do not represent the complexities of reality.
This quote by Samuel Johnson suggests that simplifying things into round numbers can lead to inaccuracies. It implies that true understanding requires a recognition of the nuances and details that are often lost when we impose neat, simple categories onto complex realities.
In practice
In a discussion about statistics, one might say, 'As Samuel Johnson wisely noted, round numbers are always false.'
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 remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.
All people are special, and all moments are golden. There is no person and there is no time more special than another. Many people choose to believe that God communicates in special ways and only with special people. This removes the mass of the people from responsibility for hearing God's message, much less receiving it (which is another matter), and allows them to take someone else's word for everything.
And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.
WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity.
Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
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