376
Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.
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Feeling
Attribution
377
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
378
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.
379
But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.
380
Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.
381
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
382
The result of it all may be summed up in his favourite motto, “Be kind, for every one is fighting a hard battle.”
Platomisattributed·“Ian Maclaren”: The Life of the Rev. John Watson, D.D., by W. Robertson Nicoll·1908
Wrongly attributed
Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.