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.
Interpretation
Don't publicly express your worries; instead, work to overcome them quietly.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the importance of managing our emotions privately rather than externalizing them through complaints. By choosing to hide our anxieties and focusing on overcoming them, we can effectively diminish their hold on us and maintain a more positive demeanor in our lives.
In practice
During a team meeting where morale is low, you could say this quote to remind everyone to focus on solutions instead of complaints.
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.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
Is detachment the answer to freedom? No, because detachment is negative - it is to be without. The answer must be positive - I must replace what I have with something better.
Why would we need to experience the Comforter if our lives are already comfortable?
My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
Your greatest adversary is also your greatest teacher. Like it or not, it is the job of certain people to bring out the worst in you. What they trigger is already in you. They are here to reveal the sore, tender wounded places in your heart and mind, and they are providing you with a wonderful and divine opportunity for healing.
It took me whole decades to appreciate the depth and true value of yoga. Sacred texts supported my discoveries, but it was not they that signposted the way. What I learned through yoga, I found out through yoga.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.