Hottscubbard

“Nothing stresses me out. Except having to seek the approval of my inferiors.” --Dwight Schrute

“You have to find the intersection of doing something you're passionate about and at the same time something that is in the service of other people...if you don't find that intersection, you're not going to be very happy in life.” --Tim Cook Source: http://fortune.com/2017/02/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-career-advice-job-money/

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do, if you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle." --Steve Jobs

Motivation

You’re better than you think you are and you can do more than you think.

--Motto of the Leadville 100

"Travelling is a fool's paradise."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"...Knowing that good things don't come easy, and being determined to stick with the goal despite the setbacks--that changes everything."

--Bear Grylls

"Someone can make a lot of money, but the one thing that money can't buy back is time!"

--Andrew Sufficool (bxa2011) from Long Haul Trucking the Great Divide

(http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1&doc_id=10717&v=Z0) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOOQ7GJdmVo)

"You need to develop the will before the body. Every move you make will come from your head. So get your head straight and don't be lazy. It doesn't take much to start. Set goals and hit them. Start slow and you'll build the will."

--Arnold Schwarzenegger (March 25, 2014; http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/21cd0k/iamarnold_i_am_back_and_i_brought_david_ayer_with/cgbo9j4)

"Theodore you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body."

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

"Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."

"When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it."

"Tired Terry still gets after it! That's all I'm saying."

--Terry Crews (http://i.imgur.com/yjZFKZ1.gif)

Stray Concepts

• Ship of Theseus
• Narcissism of small differences
• Hedonic treadmill
• Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs

Marriage Silliness Advice

Finally, we made a rule that I have loved. We don’t talk about anything serious at bed time. We have ridiculous conversations. We discuss how many squirrels you could take in a fight to the death. (He says 4 is the maximum number). We talk about which one of us is more likely to be secretly working for the CIA. It is silly, but it makes us laugh and we go to bed every night on a good note. No fights at bedtime.

Story Idea

"[Jordan] definitely had a mental illness," [Royce White] argues. "He was obsessed. He was obsessed with being great. Now, is that bad? It would be, if everybody else wasn't already telling him that he was." (Story about a person obsessed with being great at something, like Jordan, but who is terrible at it. Show the relative acceptance of bad behavior.)

• Source: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8890734/chuck-klosterman-royce-white

Great article about nature and Wordworth/Thoreau

We shake off our idealism—our dreams of mountains—at our own peril. And this seems to me one of the essential values of Wordsworth and Thoreau today (even if you aren’t contemplating a return to nature): their secular insistence that our lives have meaning beneath the immediacy of the quotidian.

"Splendid Visions"
by William Giraldi, March 2013
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7376

Great article about CCM and its ineffectiveness

This trend spreads beyond CCM into many areas of evangelical culture. The church is becoming increasingly consumer-friendly. Jacob Hill, director of “worship arts” at New Walk Church, describes the Sunday service music as “exciting, loud, powerful, and relevant,” and boasts that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” Over the past ten years, I’ve visited churches that have Starbucks kiosks in the foyer and youth wings decked out with air hockey tables. I’ve witnessed a preacher stop his sermon to play a five-minute clip from Billy Madison. I’ve walked into a sanctuary that was blasting the Black Eyed Peas’s “Let’s Get it Started” to get the congregation pumped for the morning’s message, which was on joy. I have heard a pastor say, from a pulpit, “Hey, I’m not here to preach at anyone.” And yet, in spite of these efforts, churches are retaining only 4 percent of the young people raised in their congregations.

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.

"Sniffing Glue"
by Meghan O’Gieblyn, July 2011
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2874/meghan_ogieblyn_7_15_11/

Encouragement for practice and learning new skills

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.

--From http://norvig.com/21-days.html

“Intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.” --Angela Lee Duckworth (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all)

"The advice I like to give young artists [mathematicians], or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

--Chuck Close (artist) in an interview in the book/DVD "Wisdom," by Andrew Zuckerman.

Quote that sums up my thoughts on the often abstruse language used in math education and elsewhere

The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes...."

--Edward Carr, quoting Richard Posner, in an article about polymaths (http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath)

Financial Incentives Only Aid Non-Creative Thinking and Problem Solving

When your employees have to do something straightforward, like pressing a button or manning one stage in an assembly line, financial incentives work. It's a small effect, but they do work. Simple jobs are like the simple candle problem.

However, if your people must do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives hurt. The In-Box Candle Problem is the stereotypical problem that requires you to think "Out of the Box," (you knew that was coming, didn't you?). Whenever people must think out of the box, offering them a monetary carrot will keep them in that box.

"CEOs and the Candle Problem"
by Graham Morehead, April 2012
http://blogs.nature.com/a_mad_hemorrhage/2012/04/02/ceos-and-the-candle-problem

Mad props to بطيخ

"In Your presence is fulness of joy" (Ps. 16.11)

Woody Allen

• "If you're born with a gift, to behave like it's an achievement is not right."

Aristotle

• "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."

Ambrose Bierce

• "Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."

Niels Bohr

• "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

Jerry Brown

• "I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry. Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry. I live in the question. People have so many positions, and usually the evidence is not strong enough for them really to be so confident in those conclusions. There are just a lot of things that are not certain."

Frederick Buechner

• "The love for equals is a human thing—-of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing-—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints. And then there is the love for the enemy—-the love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world."

• "Your calling is where your passions meet the world's needs."

G. K. Chesterton

• "In the break up of Christian theology in the eighteenth century, [Joseph] Butler used it, when he pointed out that rationalistic arguments could be used as much against vague religions as against doctrinal religion, as much against rationalist ethics as against Christian ethics. It is the root and reason of the fact that men who have religious faith have also philosophic doubt. These are the small streams of the delta; the book of Job is the first great cataract that creates the river. In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself."
  • "Introduction to the Book of Job"

Pete Conrad

• "If you can't be good, be colorful."

E. E. Cummings

• "To know is to possess, & any fact is possessed by everyone who knows it, whereas those who feel the truth are possessed, not possessors."

Clarence Darrow

• "I do not pretend to know, whereas many ignorant people are sure."

• "Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails."

• "You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."

• "Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for."

Albert Einstein

• "It is not the result of scientific research that ennobles humans and enriches their nature, but the struggle to understand while performing creative and open-minded intellectual work."
  • “Good and Evil” in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Travelling is a fool's paradise."

Henri Fabre

• "You understand, because you succeed in making another understand."

Milton Friedman

• "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

Carl Friedrich Gauss

• "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again; the never-satisfied man is so strange if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others."

• "The beautiful face of a madonna, a mirror of peace of mind and health, tender, somewhat fanciful eyes, a blameless figure--this is one thing; a bright mind and an educated language--this is another; but the quiet, serene, modest and chaste soul of an angel who can do no harm to any creature--that is the best." (Describing his wife, Johanna Gauss)

Jonathan Haidt

• "Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage in the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking."
  • TED Talk, "Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives," 2008

Hermann Hesse

• "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
  • Demian, p. 95

Elbert Hubbard

• "We are punished by our sins, not for them."
  • Found on this online game about game theory and trust: https://ncase.me/trust/
  • Takeaway: Copycats are most rational; why it's important to have your own set of beliefs, at the expense of maximizing return

Lewis Hyde

• "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage."

Samuel Johnson

• "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."

Clark Kerr

• "The mediator…is always subject to some abuse. He wins few clear cut victories; he must aim more at avoiding the worst than seizing the best. He must find satisfaction in being equally distasteful to each of his constituencies; he must reconcile himself to the harsh reality that successes are shrouded in silence while failures are spotlighted in notoriety."
  • The Uses of the University, 5th Ed., p. 30

Martin Luther King, Jr.

• "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
  • Source: "Strength to Love," 1963

Gustav Mahler

• "The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star, but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause."

Horace Mann

• "Be ashamed to die, until you have scored some victory for mankind."

W. Somerset Maugham

• "There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood"

John Stuart Mill

• "The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."
  • Source: "On Liberty"

Paul Motian

Legendary Jazz Drummer

• "I'm not a showpiece drummer. ... I feel like I'm an accompanist. It's my sort of thing to make the other people sound good, as good as they can be. I feel like I should accompany them, and I should accompany the sound that I am hearing and make it the best that I can — that I can do."

John Muir

• "...for going out, I found, was really going in."
• "Don't be scared to walk alone. Don't be scared to like it."

Isaac Newton

• "Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy."

Richard Nixon

• "I learned the people who have the cards are usually the ones who talk the least, and the softest. Those who are bluffing tend to talk loudly and give themselves away."

Flannery O'Connor

• "I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."

Karl Popper

• "We are all alike in our infinite ignorance."

Theodore Roosevelt

• "Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. ... I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well."
  • Source: Address before the the Iowa State Teachers' Association, Des Moines, Iowa, November, 1910

• "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."

• "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
  • Source: Address at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, April 23, 1910.—“Citizenship in a Republic,” The Strenuous Life (vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed.), chapter 21, p. 510 (1926).

• "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

• "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."

• "When you are asked if you can do a job, tell em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it."

• "Theodore you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
  • Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/25/sea/
  • Vsauce video (mentioned at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffUnNaQTfZE

Jerry Seinfeld

• "Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work."
  • Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld_here_i_will_give_you_an_answer/ceiw3cc

John Steinbeck

• "It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it."
  • Source: East of Eden

Robert Louis Stevenson

• "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
  • Source: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878)

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

US (Hungarian-born) biochemist (1893 - 1986)

• "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
  • Source: The Scientist Speculates (1962), by Irving Good

Henry David Thoreau

• "True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."
  • Source: A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, p. 298, (1873)

Leo Tolstoy

• "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

Arnold J. Toynbee

• "It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it."

Walt Whitman

• "The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections."
  • Source: The Wild Gander

Carl Wilson

• "It’s always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness."
  • Source: Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

Homer Bannon (Character played by Melvyn Douglas in Hud)

• "Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. You're just going to have to make up your own mind one day about what's right and wrong."

Woody Allen

• "I was thrown out of NYU for cheating on a metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy next to me."

George Burns

• "Sincerity is everything. Once you can fake that, you've got it made."

Stephen Colbert

• "O'Reilly & Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities onto the world around them, inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance, itty bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision!"

Larry David

• "[I] had a wonderful childhood, which is tough, because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood."

Groucho Marx

• "Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?"
  • Source: Not really him, but probably Thomas Stafford or Joseph Addison in the early 1700s.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

"There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science."

Alexander Grothendieck

"I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics, to meet quite a number of people, both among my elders and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle -- while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone."

Hammersley

"People do acquire a little brief authority by equipping themselves with jargon: they can pontificate and air a superficial expertise. But what we should ask of educated mathematicians is not what they can speechify about, nor even what they know about the existing corpus of mathematical knowledge, but rather what can they now do with their learning and whether they can actually solve mathematical problems arising in practice. In short, we look for deeds, not words."

Thomas Mann

"A writer [mathematician] is a person for whom writing [mathematics] is more difficult than it is for other people." [Adapted for my purposes!]

Johann von Neumann

"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

Vonnegut on His Son Being a Conscientious Objector

November 28, 1967

To Draft Board #1, Selective Service, Hyannis, Mass.

Gentlemen:

My son Mark Vonnegut is registered with you. He is now in the process of requesting classification as a conscientious objector. I thoroughly approve of what he is doing. It is in keeping with the way I have raised him. All his life he has learned hatred for killing from me.

I was a volunteer in the Second World War. I was an infantry scout, saw plenty of action, was finally captured and served about six months as a prisoner of war in Germany. I have a Purple Heart. I was honorably discharged. I am entitled, it seems to me, to pass on to my son my opinion of killing. I don't even hunt or fish any more. I have some guns which I inherited, but they are covered with rust.

This attitude toward killing is a matter between my God and me. I do not participate much in organized religion. I have read the Bible a lot. I preach, after a fashion. I write books which express my disgust for people who find it easy and reasonable to kill.

We say grace at meals, taking turns. Every member of my family has been called upon often to thank God for blessings which have been ours. What Mark is doing now is in the service of God, Whose Son was exceedingly un-warlike.

There isn't a grain of cowardice in this. Mark is a strong, courageous young man. What he is doing requires more guts than I ever had—and more decency.

My family has been in this country for five generations now. My ancestors came here to escape the militaristic madness and tyranny of Europe, and to gain the freedom to answer the dictates of their own consciences. They and their descendents have been good citizens and proud to be Americans. Mark is proud to be an American, and, in his father's opinion, he is being an absolutely first-rate citizen now.

He will not hate. He will not kill. There's no hope in that. There's no hope in war.

Yours truly,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

• Source: Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

The Golden Rule

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Matthew 7:12.

On the assurance of the love of God toward us, Jesus enjoins love to one another, in one comprehensive principle covering all the relations of human fellowship. {MB 134.1}

The Jews had been concerned about what they should receive; the burden of their anxiety was to secure what they thought their due of power and respect and service. But Christ teaches that our anxiety should not be, How much are we to receive? but, How much can we give? The standard of our obligation to others is found in what we ourselves would regard as their obligation to us. {MB 134.2}

In your association with others, put yourself in their place. Enter into their feelings, their difficulties, their disappointments, their joys, and their sorrows. Identify yourself with them, and then do to them as, were you to exchange places with them, you would wish them to deal with you. This is the true rule of honesty. It is another expression of the law. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Matthew 22:39. And it is the substance of the teaching of the prophets. It is a principle of heaven, and will be developed in all who are fitted for its holy companionship. {MB 134.3}

The golden rule is the principle of true courtesy, and its truest illustration is seen in the life and character of Jesus. Oh, what rays of softness and beauty shone forth in the daily life of our Saviour! What sweetness flowed from His very presence! The same spirit will be revealed in His children. Those with whom Christ dwells will be surrounded with a divine atmosphere. Their white robes of purity will be fragrant with perfume from the garden of the Lord. Their faces will reflect light from His, brightening the path for stumbling and weary feet. {MB 135.1}

No man who has the true ideal of what constitutes a perfect character will fail to manifest the sympathy and tenderness of Christ. The influence of grace is to soften the heart, to refine and purify the feelings, giving a heaven-born delicacy and sense of propriety. {MB 135.2}

But there is a yet deeper significance to the golden rule. Everyone who has been made a steward of the manifold grace of God is called upon to impart to souls in ignorance and darkness, even as, were he in their place, he would desire them to impart to him. The apostle Paul said, "I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise." Romans 1:14. By all that you have known of the love of God, by all that you have received of the rich gifts of His grace above the most benighted and degraded soul upon the earth are you in debt to that soul to impart these gifts unto him. {MB 135.3}

So also with the gifts and blessings of this life: whatever you may possess above your fellows places you in debt, to that degree, to all who are less favored. Have we wealth, or even the comforts of life, then we are under the most solemn obligation to care for the suffering sick, the widow, and the fatherless exactly as we would desire them to care for us were our condition and theirs to be reversed. {MB 136.1}

The golden rule teaches, by implication, the same truth which is taught elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount, that "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." That which we do to others, whether it be good or evil, will surely react upon ourselves, in blessing or in cursing. Whatever we give, we shall receive again. The earthly blessings which we impart to others may be, and often are, repaid in kind. What we give does, in time of need, often come back to us in fourfold measure in the coin of the realm. But, besides this, all gifts are repaid, even in this life, in the fuller inflowing of His love, which is the sum of all heaven's glory and its treasure. And evil imparted also returns again. Everyone who has been free to condemn or discourage, will in his own experience be brought over the ground where he has caused others to pass; he will feel what they have suffered because of his want of sympathy and tenderness. {MB 136.2}

It is the love of God toward us that has decreed this. He would lead us to abhor our own hardness of heart and to open our hearts to let Jesus abide in them. And thus, out of evil, good is brought, and what appeared a curse becomes a blessing. {MB 136.3}

The standard of the golden rule is the true standard of Christianity; anything short of it is a deception. A religion that leads men to place a low estimate upon human beings, whom Christ has esteemed of such value as to give Himself for them; a religion that would lead us to be careless of human needs, sufferings, or rights, is a spurious religion. In slighting the claims of the poor, the suffering, and the sinful, we are proving ourselves traitors to Christ. It is because men take upon themselves the name of Christ, while in life they deny His character, that Christianity has so little power in the world. The name of the Lord is blasphemed because of these things. {MB 136.4}

Of the apostolic church, in those bright days when the glory of the risen Christ shone upon them, it is written that no man said "that aught of the things which he possessed was his own." "Neither was there any among them that lacked." "And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all." "And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved." Acts 4:32, 34, 33; 2:46, 47. {MB 137.1}

Search heaven and earth, and there is no truth revealed more powerful than that which is made manifest in works of mercy to those who need our sympathy and aid. This is the truth as it is in Jesus. When those who profess the name of Christ shall practice the principles of the golden rule, the same power will attend the gospel as in apostolic times.