According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
It is not 'Is God on my side', but 'Am I on God's side'.
My beliefs will run through everything I do. My beliefs, my values are my anchor and when people try to drag me, as I know they will, it is to that sense of right and wrong, that sense of who I am and what I believe, to which I will always hold.
The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.
Somewhat by historical happenstance the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China - also were the original five countries to have nuclear weapons.