Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.
Interpretation
Respecting your opponents can be a powerful strategy in conflicts.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the importance of respect even towards adversaries. By treating those who oppose us with dignity, we not only uphold our own integrity but can also disarm them, potentially leading to more favorable outcomes in conflicts. Such an approach does not imply weakness; rather, it demonstrates strength of character and insight into human nature.
In practice
During a debate, I reminded everyone that treating opponents with respect can lead to constructive dialogue.
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.
Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
Prescribing hard work for the soft, or easy work for the hardy, is generally nonsense. What is always needed in any aim is right effort, right time, right people, right materials.
Fear is a natural reaction of moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.
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