Words to Live By 11: Look Up!

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by Seattle Jon:

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Previous Words to Live By here.

Look Up!
by Joseph Wood Krutch (Author and Naturalist)

"He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many take it for granted that progress means the gradual elimination of everything which God and nature put into our world and the substitution for it of the conveniences which man has made.

I like many of them well enough myself, and I have no illusions concerning the "noble savage." Civilized life is the only truly human life. I will take wild flowers and television if I can have them both. But a civilization which has no appreciation of or love for the beauties of nature is only a new kind of barbarism.

It is good that we have our parks, our museums, our nature-study clubs. Nevertheless, opportunities to see wild birds in flight or a wild flower blooming in lonely loveliness grow fewer and fewer because we do not value them enough.

Of course, we need paved highways. But we need quiet wood roads, too. We need television, yet we also need the opportunity to see geese flying against the autumn sky. Unless we realize how much we need these simple pleasures, the time may come when we don't have them. "Nature is the art of God," and a flower is more wonderful than the most ingenious of man's machines.


Seattle Jon is a family man, little league coach, urban farmer and businessman living in Seattle. He currently gets up early with the markets to trade bonds for a living. In his spare time he enjoys movies, thrifting and is an avid reader. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and the Japan Fukuoka mission field. He has one wife, four kids and three chickens.

Words to Live By 10: The Aim

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by Seattle Jon:

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Previous Words to Live By here.

The Aim
by George N. Shuster (Noted Educator, Notre Dame University)

"As for myself, I want to do my work well ... and to die well." - Unknown French Girl

In 1919, I lived in Poitiers as a student in a room looking out on the old street up which Jeanne d'Arc had come to see the Dauphin. Like many a soldier just out of the trenches, I thought of the place I had to make for myself in the world rather than of how I would go about it or why. early one morning I overheard two girls talking on their way to work. "As for myself," I heard one say, "I want to do my work well ... and to die well."

"To want to do one's work well." When you really want to do something well, whatever it may be, you can laugh, sing, drink a toast to life.

But that is only part of it; now think of the business of living as ending with a balance sheet to be looked at when the business is over. Mortality's best prelude to immortality would be to find nothing in life of which one had to be terribly ashamed: to be sure no other human being could justly say you had ruined his spirit or grossly betrayed his trust, and even to be able to say that enemies had not been hated. In the conversation of the two French girls I found the conviction that life must retain a quality only the word holiness can describe. And I began to think of what my story would read like at the end.

I had not managed as well as the French girl doubtless did. Even so, it has been increasingly evident that our human society prospers only when there are many who see life as she did. Her sermon was brief, but it still seems to me the best I have ever heard.

Words to Live By 9: What is Love?

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

What is Love?
by Erich Fromm (Author of "The Art of Loving")

"There is only one kind of love, but it has a thousand guises." - La Rochefoucauld

The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The full answer to the problem of existence lies in true and mature love.

What is mature love? It is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power, a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow man. Love overcomes the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits you to be yourself. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

Words to Live By 8: On Hope

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Hope
by The Reverend John LaFarge (Famous Catholic Editor and Author)

"Hope does not disappoint." - St. Paul

I have learned that you can build a life upon hope, and if that principle is your anchor, plenty of other people will cast their moornings hard by you.

Life has taught me that the hopeful policy wins acceptance from even embittered minds. The prophet of despair gains a shouting audience. But one who speaks from hope will be heard long after the noise dies down.

As St. Paul said, "Hope does not disappoint." It is man's answer to the trust placed in him by the Creator.

Words to Live By 7: On Self-Respect

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Self-Respect
by Phyllis McGinley (Pulitzer Prize Poet)

"Don't let your sins turn into bad habits." - St. Teresa of Avila

The woman I quote was one of the wittiest, holiest, most delightful creatures who ever lived. She was speaking to a nun of her order, an overscrupulous girl who came to hear in tears, berating her own evil nature. "Ah, my dear," Teresa consoled her, "all of us are human and prone to sin. Just see to it that you don't let your sins turn into bad habits."

The paradox is as full of common sense as it is of the saint's famous salty humor. Certainly to err is human, and Teresa knew it as well as the poet Alexander Pope. It is not the occasional lapse but the repeated fault which turns us into the sort of persons we do not wish to be. We can all mourn a trouble. It's the habit of self-pity which corrodes character. To fly into a rage now and then is excusable. But to let a habit of anger master us is to court destruction. We all like gossip, it's the amusing small change of conversation. But a habit of malice can turn us into bores, troublemakers, monsters of mischief.

Few of us are murderers or traitors or thieves. Yet unkindness is a sin, too, and so is selfishness or intemperance or spite or hate or sloth or detraction. And how many of us are altogether free of those flaws? Wisdom lies in the ability to forgive ourselves such human failings - to tumble, pick ourselves up, shake the dust off our spirits, and try to avoid the next mistake.

No matter what degree of religious faith we profess, all of us yearn to be decent people and we believe in free will. Teresa has given us the best possible advice to follow on the thorny, difficult road to self-respect.

Words to Live By 6: On Honor

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Honor
by General Mark W. Clark (President of the Citadel, Military College of South Carolina)

"A Cadet does not lie, or cheat, or steal." - The Citadel Honor Code

I have always believed that everyone needs to impose upon himself some rigid code of personal ethics. The Ten Commandments are probably the most perfect example of such a code.

But it seems to me that young people, who perhaps need rules of conduct the most, tend to shy away from long or complex lists of "do's" and "don'ts." That is why we at The Citadel have established our Honor Code which consists of just one rule expressed in nine words: "A Cadet does not lie, or cheat, or steal."

Just nine words. But what important words they are, for without them none can hope to build a decent or a happy life.

Of course, The Citadel's Honor Code is only a beginning. Of course, our 2,000 Cadets know that there is more to character than merely not lying, cheating or stealing. But these negatives are important as a starting point. A man can then go on from these "don'ts" to more positive rules of life. If, as a boy, he learns what not to do, then as he matures, the positive values will slowly move into place. "Do unto others ..." "Love they neighbor ..." - these "do's" are the true capstones of a moral code. But the "don'ts," learned in childhood, are its foundation.

Words to Live By 5: On Decisiveness

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Decisiveness
by William G. Saltonstall (Principal of the Phillips Exeter Academy)

"Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise." - Horace

One of our human failings, as I see it, has been our admiration for the "middle-of-the-roader." Certainly many of us agree that the exercise of restraint is one of the marks of the good man. But in some areas compromise is flabby and dangerous. Any person of real conviction and strength must choose one side of the road or the other. It would be a strange kind of education that urged us to be "relatively" honest, "sometimes" just, "usually" tolerant, "for the most part" decent.

As you read history and biography, I think you will not come to equate greatness with compromise. Rather, you will find it in decisiveness, combined with charity, gentleness and justice. There will be some wrong decisions, of course, but as long as mistakes are recognized, the loss is far less serious than that occasioned by playing the middle of the road, sitting on the fence, undecided, unconvinced, incapable of strong feeling.

Life should be a continuing search for those people, those ideas and those causes to which we can gladly and wholly give ourselves.

Words To Live By 4: On Courage

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Courage
by Alfred Lansing (Author of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage)

"Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success." - Sir Ernest Shackleton

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer. To recruit men for one of his expeditions, he rant the forthright want ad quoted above in a London newspaper.

Sir Ernest wasn't joking. The ad proved grimly prophetic for the brave men who volunteered for the three Antarctic expeditions he led. On one, the ship itself was lost, along with most of the supplies. The men spent 21 months in a living nightmare, camped on drifting ice or struggling toward civilization in three tiny boats.

Yet the men who had signed up for the "hazardous journey" not only refused to give up - they somehow managed to remain cheerful. And they won. Every last one of them returned to civilization alive.

In his want ad, Shackleton had promised "honor and recognition" - and it was heaped upon them. But actually they had earned something much, much greater. Shackleton himself later sought to put it into words: "We pierced the veneer of outside things," he wrote. "We suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory ... we reached the naked soul of man."

Nowadays, it seems, security is all-important. Too often, I feel, we are satisfied to play it safe, to aim only for the "sure thing." And while most of us still dream of making some sort of "hazardous journey" in our lives, not very many really make them. As a result, our lives many be safer and saner - but we may in the end be making a world in which fewer and fewer every catch a glimpse of the magnificent naked soul of man.

Words To Live By 3: The Hidden Power

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

The Hidden Power
by Lewis L. Strauss (former Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission)

"As he thinketh in his heart, so is he." - Proverbs 23:7

It is so much easier to control our actions than our thoughts. Law and public sanctions help us keep our deeds in line - but only Conscience polices our thoughts.

Not long ago, meeting with several aging classmates, we talked about the events that had left their marks upon us when we were in high school together. Above all else, one occasion stood out clearly in all our minds. It was the day, nearly 50 years ago, when the governor of a distant state spoke at our high school assembly in my home town in Virginia. His theme was that a boy could mold his future as a man by the kind of thoughts he encouraged, and those he forbade himself to think. The text he used was, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

That thought, of all those brought to us as youngsters, made so deep an impression upon our minds that not one of us had forgotten it.

Words to Live By 2: On Questions

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Questions
by Bergen Evans (teacher and TV quiz expert)

"He that nothing questionith, nothing learneth" - Thomas Fuller

I think one of the most fruitful moments in my life came when my old zoology professor, Dr. Stephen Williams of Miami University, in Ohio, whom I greatly respected, told me that he would give any student an A in his course who asked one intelligent question.

Up to that time I had assumed that intelligence consisted of giving answers. Now I began to see that the question is as much a part of knowledge as the answer - often the more important part. Because it's the question that shows us what we don't know.

Men had assumed from the beginning of time that a heavier object fell faster than a lighter one - until Galileo said, "Does it?" Men had marveled at the giraffe's neck for thousands of years before Darwin asked, "Why?"

But it isn't just scientists who should ask questions. No one knows all the answers and if he thinks he does he has stopped thinking and growing. Part of being alive and in touch with the world around and within you lies in searching for your own answers, in asking your own questions.

It has been thirty-six years since my old teaching startled me with his pronouncement. For thirty of those years I have myself been a teacher. Most of the facts he taught me - most of the answers he gave me - have long been forgotten. But I have not forgotten that a questioning student is more important than an answering teacher.

Words To Live By 1: Why Everything Counts

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a new MMM series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times.

Why Everything Counts
by Samuel Goldwyn (famous Hollywood producer)

"You always meet people a second time." - Unknown

Those words were told to me when I was quite young, and whether I have fully succeeded or not, I have at least always tried to act accordingly. I know of no better advice to pass on - especially to young people.

The first impressions you make are usually the most important. What you say - what you do - how you act - the first time you meet someone, will largely determine your reception the next time. Even though it may be years later, people will usually remember whether you were courteous or rude, decent or smart-alecky, honest or dishonest, and the general impression you made.

Be yourself with everyone you meet - but be your best self, for you can be sure that before you have lived out your life, you are going to meet again.