Bishop Sheen added: “These are but popular ways of expressing the virtue of humility, which does not consist so much in humbling ourselves before others as it does in recognizing our own littleness in comparison to what we ought to be.”
Whatever you are by nature, keep to it;
never desert your line of talent.
Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.SYDNEY SMITH, quoted in Pushing to the Front,
an 1896 book by Orison Swett Marden
Never think that you’re not good enough yourself.
A man should never think that.
People will take you very much at your own reckoning.ANTHONY TROLLOPE, from a character in his
1864 novel The Small House at Allington
One must never let the fire go out in one’s soul, but keep it burning.VINCENT VAN GOGH,
in an 1878 letter to his brother Theo
Never let work drive you; master it and keep in complete control.BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, quoted in
Speeches of Booker T. Washington (1932)
Never dream of forcing men into the ways of God.JOHN WESLEY
Wesley, an Anglican clergyman who founded Methodism, added:Think yourself, and let think. Use no constraint in matters of religion. Even those who are farthest out of the way never compel to come in by any other means than reason, truth, and love.
Unlike so many of his fervid contemporaries, Wesley eschewed a doctrinaire approach to religion. He urged his followers: “Beware you are not a fiery, persecuting enthusiast.”
Never swallow anything whole.ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD,
in a 1944 conversation
“To swallow” literally means to ingest through the mouth and throat, but since the late sixteenth century has been extended to mean “to believe uncritically or accept without question.” This sense of the word shows up in sayings like “it was hard to swallow” or “he swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.” Whitehead added:We live . . . by half-truths and get along fairly well as long as we do not mistake them for whole-truths, but when we do mistake them, they raise the devil with us.
Albert Schweitzer was thinking similarly when he wrote: “To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason.”
Never love anything that can’t love you back.BRUCE WILLIAMS, American radio personality
This is one of Williams’s personal maxims—and a beautiful way of making the point that we should never place more importance on possessions than we do on people.
Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little
but needs that little so much.MARGARET WILLOUR, quoted in Reader’s Digest (1982)
Never let a crisis go to waste.FAREED ZAKARIA
Zakaria, an Indian-born American journalist and television news host, offered this in a December 2008 Newsweek essay. He may have been inspired by a remark made six months earlier by Stanford University economist Paul Romer, who piggybacked on the motto of the United Negro College Fund to observe, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The underlying idea also showed up in remarks made by Rahm Emanuel, the newly named White House chief of staff, shortly after the 2008 presidential election. In a New York Times column, Emanuel was quoted as saying, “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” All of these observations were stimulated by the financial meltdown occurring at the time, and they were all anticipated by a famous 1959 observation from John F. Kennedy: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
three
Never Give Advice Unless Asked
Advice
On January 24, 2005, William Safire wrote his final op-ed column for the New York Times. It had been thirty-two years since the former Nixon-Agnew speechwriter was asked to lend his voice to what he called “the liberal chorus” of the newspaper (one critic of the newspaper’s decision to hire Safire said that it was like setting a hawk loose among the doves). From 1973 to 2005, Safire wrote more than three thousand biweekly columns, winning the admiration of conservatives and the ire of liberals for speaking his mind and pulling no punches.
He also earned the respect of word and language lovers worldwide for his “On Language” column, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine from 1979 until his death in 2009 at age seventy-nine. For three decades, Safire built an immense fan base who treasured his weekly excursions into the origins of words, the meanings of phrases, and the role that language plays in our lives.
Safire would have agreed with Kingsley Amis, who said, “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” In fact, he often said he enjoyed the indignation his columns aroused, once writing: “The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.” (And yes, that was Safire’s clever way of tweaking fit of pique).
In 1996, during what came to be known as “Travelgate,” First Lady Hillary Clinton denied any role in the firing of a number of White House travel agents. Most Washington insiders took her denial with a grain of salt, considering it a standard political denial and not a binding oath. Not Safire, however. He called Mrs. Clinton “a congenital liar.” At a press briefing a few days later, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry how the president felt about Safire’s characterization of the first lady. McCurry began by calling the article “an outrageous political attack” and then described his boss’s reaction this way:
The President, if he were not the President, would have delivered
a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.
McCurry quickly added that the president “knows he can’t possibly do such a thing.” A few days later, Safire—ever the language maven—said he thoroughly approved of the way McCurry had phrased his original conditional statement.
Safire’s final op-ed column in 2005 was given a simple but compelling title: “Never Retire!” In the column, written when he was seventy-five, Safire said he was soon to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, which supports research in neuroscience, immunology, and brain disorders. His decision to continue working rather than retire was based on a piece of advice he had received a few years earlier from the 1962 Nobel laureate James Watson:
Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.
Urging readers “to think about a longevity strategy,” Safire recommended that they lay the foundation for later endeavors while in the midst of their careers:The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
Safire’s advice dovetails perfectly with what gerontology experts have long recommended. In 1998, David Mahoney and Richard Restak came out with The Longevity Strategy: How to Live to be 100 Using the Brain-Body Connection. The two men distilled years of neuroscience research into thirty-one recommendations designed to increase longevity. Of their many helpful tips, one stands out:
Never retire.
To paraphrase Winston Churchilclass="underline" Never, never, never retire.