He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
Interpretation
The wise choose to remain with the known rather than risk everything for something uncertain.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the importance of prudence and rational decision-making. It suggests that a truly wise person evaluates the risks of abandoning a certain situation for the allure of an uncertain opportunity, advocating for a careful consideration of the potential consequences before making significant life choices.
In practice
In a graduation speech, one might use this quote to encourage graduates to make wise life choices.
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.
My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative - the story of mankind, not just of man.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.