To learn to love, one must first learn to see. - Maurice Maeterlinck

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of appreciating danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful abyss that separates this life from the life unknown. We were even almost persuaded that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers, that is to say, of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the only absolute realities — health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body and, above all, life, the greatest of earthly possessions — for the sake of an ideal which, like all ideals, is more or less invisible.

Why not admit that it is not our paramount duty to weep with all those who are weeping, to suffer with all who are sad, to expose our heart to the passer-by for him to caress or stab? Tears and suffering and wounds are helpful to us only when they do not discourage our life.