A Quote by Samuel Johnson

It seems to be remarkable that death increases our veneration for the good, and extenuates our hatred for the bad. — © Samuel Johnson
It seems to be remarkable that death increases our veneration for the good, and extenuates our hatred for the bad.
As Shantideva says, suffering has many good qualities because it purifies our negative karma, increases our renunciation and compassion, reduces our pride, and helps us to overcome our bad mental habits. If we think in this way we will feel that difficult circumstances are our best friends. When our mind is balanced in this way it becomes as stable as Mount Meru, and nothing can cause it to shake.
It seems to me there are good deficits and bad deficits. Now, we have a deficit that comes from the militarization of our society and our policy and our approach to the global arena.
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
Education is the proper way to promote compassion and tolerance in society. Compassion and peace of mind bring a sense of confidence that reduce stress and anxiety, whereas anger and hatred come from frustration and undermine our sense of trust. Because of ignorance, many of our problems are our own creation. Education, however, is the instrument that increases our ability to employ our own intelligence.
Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.
The more various our artificial necessities, the wider is our circle of pleasure; for all pleasure consists in obviating necessities as they rise; luxury, therefore, as it increases our wants, increases our capacity for happiness
It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.
Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.
Yet we didn't fix anything. Our roads are bad, our bridges are bad, our tunnels are bad, our schools are bad, our hospitals are bad.
Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.
The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison; they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world.
If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can.
Let us display our loyalty and love and embrace every opportunity to become wealthy and strong; let our first object be the veneration of the Imperial Court, which vouchsafes its protection to the commonwealth, and let those who hold the reins of government consider the general good.
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.
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