It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
Interpretation
Poverty can bring a unique happiness free from envy and complications that wealth often entails.
In this quote, Samuel Johnson reflects on the unexpected advantages of poverty, suggesting that those who are poor can experience a simplicity of joy that wealthy individuals often lack. He implies that wealth brings complications such as envy, the need for constant protection, and dependence on others to maintain their lifestyle, while those who are poor can find happiness and security directly from nature without the encumbrances of wealth.
In practice
This quote could be shared at a charity event to highlight the value of happiness beyond material wealth.
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.
A good life happens when you stop and are grateful for the ordinary moments that so many of us just steamroll over to try to find those extraordinary moments.
How would you know what happy is if you've never been otherwise.
It is vital that people "count their blessings:" to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss.
It is pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.
Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
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