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.
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
The demands of having to be 'masculine' are as damaging to men as the demands of having to be 'feminine' are to women. I wish we could all agree just to wash it all away. Begin again.
Shyness is about the fear of social judgments - at a job interview or a party you might be excessively worried about what people think of you. Whereas an introvert might not feel any of those things at all, they simply have the preference to be in a quieter setting.
My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.
Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.
Two ( or more) people come together and they agree that they should be together for a common purpose and that purpose is to add value to one another. ENGAGEMENTS are partnerships that should ALWAYS be Win-Win.
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