We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Interpretation
Our friendships and animosities are of our own making, but our neighbors are determined by circumstances beyond our control.
This quote reflects on the nature of human relationships and the role of chance and divine providence in the formation of our social environment. While we have the agency to choose our friends and enemies based on our actions and judgments, our neighbors are often determined by situational factors, suggesting that some aspects of our lives are predetermined or out of our hands, and we must learn to navigate those relationships as they come.
In practice
This quote could be a starting point for a discussion on community dynamics in a neighborhood meeting.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.
The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.
There are subtle ways and overt ways of alienating a child from a parent, but either way it's evil
If our bodies are sick, we seek to heal them. We do not give up. The same thing should be true of our marriages.
We must build relationships, get to know one another's children, open our arms rather than close our hearts.
you may fume and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am certain. I like you more than I can say; but Iβll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee Iβll keep you from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual advantage.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.