There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. He that worries himself with the dread of possible contingencies will never be at rest.
Interpretation
Worrying about the future prevents us from finding peace in the present.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes that a constant preoccupation with future uncertainties creates anxiety and disrupts one's peace of mind. He suggests that those who dwell on potential problems or outcomes will find it challenging to experience true rest and comfort in their lives, as anxiety over what may come keeps them in a state of unrest.
In practice
A motivational speaker might use this quote to encourage an audience to focus on the present rather than worry about what might happen later.
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.
If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.
You either ride life or it rides you. Your mental attitude determines who is 'rider' and who is 'horse.'
Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.
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