"Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be men and only men."- Goethe
Whatever our grand ideas are of humanity and the human enterprise, Goethe once again brings us into the ordinary world of our everyday lives. That is where the real challenge lies, what I would think of now as our individual “spiritual curriculum.”
It’s all too easy to promulgate grand notions of mankind at large. The true measure of our character is how we live our lives, how we treat people, in the smallest daily encounters.
I think the cartoon character Linus captured Goethe’s guidance in Charles Schulz’ Peanuts comic strip- “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”
About this series-
I love words. I love when a word exactly captures the moment, the feeling. How it precisely describes something that you experienced but didn’t know exactly how to express. It’s like a warm bath or a deeply satisfying meal.
And beyond that- a collection of words. A deeply insightful phrase, thought-provoking and uplifting. A quote to remember.
I started collecting quotes when I was 16 years old. (1972) I’m 68 now, as I write these words, (2024), and there are 472 quotes in my collection. At this precise moment.
That’s not really that many over the course of 52 years. I guess I am fairly discriminating. Sometimes years can go by and the collection lays dormant. In other years there is a great harvest of quotes.
These are not necessarily famous quotes, things you’ll often hear referenced. For the most part, they simply represent words that I read that made me stop for a moment to meditate and bask in their impact. And quotes I enjoy reading and re-reading and quoting myself!
These quotes represent the evolution of my thinking over the course of 52 years. I look forward to pondering what it is that made me find each one meaningful enough to save.
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