If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet;
how important you can be to people you may never even dream of.
There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.
Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Thoughts For All Ages
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—
but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
I agree with Paul that love is more important than faith and hope;
but so are honesty, integrity, and moral courage.
The world needs less faith and more love and nobility.
Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism
Be ambitious for the higher gifts,
And I’m going to show you a way
that is better than any of them.
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have no love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbol.
I may have the gift of prophecy,
and know every hidden truth;
I may have faith strong enough to move mountains;
but if I have no love,
I am nothing.
If I offer all my goods to the poor, piece by piece
and deliver my body to be burned,
I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful,
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the truth.
Love forgives all things,
bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
Endures all things.
Love never ends;
as for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for knowledge, it will vanish.
For our knowledge and our prophecy alike are imperfect,
and the imperfect vanishes when wholeness comes.
When I was a child,
my speech, my outlook and my thoughts were all childish.
When I grew up, I had done with childish things.
Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror,
but then we shall see face to face.
My knowledge now is imperfect,
then it will be whole,
like God’s knowledge of me.
So faith, hope, love abide –
these three –
but the greatest of these
is love.
Saint Paul, Letter to the Corinthians
It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything
hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red
along with some resentment I’d held in
for a few weeks, which was not helped
by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables,
or by talk that promised to be nothing
if not small. But I’d consented to come,
and I knew what part of the house
their animals would be sequestered,
whose company I loved. What else can I say,
except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown—
I’d brought him along, too. I was out
to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me,
but did not ask about my soul, which was when
I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red
to find the right kind of glass, and pour.
I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall,
then walked past a group of women
dressed to be seen, undressing them
one by one, and went up the stairs to where
the Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom,
and got down with them on all fours.
They licked the face I offered them,
and I proceeded to slick back my hair
with their saliva, and before long
I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
calm down, after a while they open the door
and let you out, they pet your head, and everything
you might have held against them is gone,
and you’re good friends again. Stay, they said.
Stephen Dunn
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose