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.
Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at meanspirited roadhouses.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
If you want to be wrong then follow the masses.
We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.
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