"If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon those with whom you live. The number of people who have taken out judges' patents for themselves is very large in any society. Now it would be hard for a man to live with another who was always criticising his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism. It would be like living between the glasses of a microscope. But these self-elected judges, like their prototypes, are very apt to have the persons they judge brought before them in the guise of culprits.
"Let not familiarity swallow up old courtesy. Many of us have a habit of saying to those with whom we live such things as we say about strangers behind their backs. There is no place, however, where real politeness is of more value than where we mostly think it would be superfluous. You may say more truth, or rather speak out more plainly to your associates, but not less courteously than to strangers."
Sir Arthur Helps.
"For manners are not idle, but the fruit
Of loyal nature, and of noble mind."
Tennyson.
MAY 3
"There is nothing which seems to try men's patience and good temper more than feebleness: the timidity, the vacillation, the conventionality, the fretfulness, the prejudices of the weak; the fact that people can be so well-meaning and so disappointing, these things make many men impatient to a degree of which they are themselves ashamed. But it is something far more than patience and good temper towards weakness that is demanded here. It is that the strong, in whatsoever sphere their strength may lie, should try in silence and simplicity, escaping the observation of men, to take upon their own shoulders the burdens which the weak are bearing; to submit themselves to the difficulties amidst which the weak are stumbling on; to be, for their help's sake, as they are; to share the fear, the dimness, the anxiety, the trouble and heart-sinking through which they have to work their way; to forego and lay aside the privilege of strength in order to understand the weak and backward and bewildered, in order to be with them, to enter into their thoughts, to wait on their advance; to be content, if they can only serve, so to speak, as a favourable circumstance for their growth towards that which God intended them to be. It is the innermost reality of sympathy, it is the very heart and life of courtesy, that is touched here: but like all that is best in moral beauty, it loses almost all its grace the moment it attracts attention."
The Spirit of Discipline, Bishop Paget.
"Nothing but the Infinite pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life."