I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity. I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not - more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving.
Interpretation
True serenity comes from focusing on loving others instead of seeking their love.
In this quote, Beverly Sills reflects on reaching a stage of personal maturity where external validation becomes less significant. She emphasizes that genuine contentment arises not from being loved, but from the ability to love others, which transforms one's perspective on life into one of selflessness and generosity.
In practice
This quote can inspire a community service event focused on helping others.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
There is no shortcut to anyplace worth going.
Only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
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