Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Interpretation
The quest for truth can be unsatisfying for those seeking only easy answers, leading them to pursue falsehoods instead.
In this quote, Samuel Johnson uses a metaphor of milk production to illustrate how those who cannot accept the hard truths of life may abandon genuine inquiry for more appealing falsehoods. The cow represents truth that no longer provides the satisfaction or 'milk' that people desire, prompting them to pursue more enticing but misleading alternatives, as symbolized by milking the bull.
In practice
In a debate about morality, this quote could highlight the importance of facing difficult truths rather than settling for comfortable lies.
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 armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exileβs life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
I am on fire within._x000D_ There comes no murmur of reply._x000D_ What is it that will take away my sin,_x000D_ And save me lest I die?
I do not believe that the Great Spirit Chief gave one kind of men the right to tell another kind of men what they must do.
A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.
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