Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them.
Interpretation
People often allow external factors to shape their thoughts and beliefs.
Samuel Johnson's quote reflects the idea that many individuals do not think independently and are heavily influenced by their surroundings and the opinions of others. This suggests a lack of personal agency and a tendency to conform to societal norms or pressures rather than forming oneβs own opinions and ideas.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the effects of social media on individual thought.
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.
Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.
PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the standard of excellence.
Shortly, the public will be unable to reason or think for themselves. They'll only be able to parrot the information they've been given on the previous night's news.
The first question here, then, is not "What is best for my soul?" nor is it even "What is most useful to humanity?" But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?
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