He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master.
Interpretation
Learning from others is a noble experience that deserves respect and admiration.
This quote by Samuel Johnson emphasizes the value of education and the respect owed to those who impart knowledge. It suggests that any individual who teaches us something new deserves to be honored as a master, highlighting the importance of valuing educators and the learning process itself as a means of personal and intellectual growth.
In practice
In a graduation speech to honor teachers, this quote can be used to emphasize their impact.
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.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.
Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Feeling gratitude isn't born in us-it's something we are taught, and in turn, we teach our children.
I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.
Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
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