To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.
Interpretation
Striving against challenges is essential for true happiness and self-worth.
Samuel Johnson reflects on the importance of facing life's challenges and overcoming them as the true measure of human happiness and fulfillment. He suggests that without struggle or achievement, one merely exists without purpose, and any satisfaction derived from such a life is a result of insensibility to their own lack of merit and success.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire people to embrace challenges.
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.
The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws.
Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.
It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who says:Who is more ungodly than I, that I may rejoice in his teaching?
My view is that we stand up for treating the animals in a considerate way, for completely renouncing the eating of meat and also for speaking out against it. This is what I do myself. And in this way many a one becomes aware of a problem that was put forward so late.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
A precedent embalms a principle.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.