There are still 2 days of Christmas left! Van Dyke gives the best farewell lines into the New Year.
Henry van Dyke (1852-1933)
Van Dyke was an American writer, Presbyterian minister, professor, diplomat and a well-known expert on fly-fishing. He taught literature at Princeton University and in 1912 was elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. President Wilson appointed him U.S. minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg.For all van Dyke did, strange that he is remembered for this famous, enduring quotation.
Are you willing...
·
to
forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people
have done for you;
·
to
ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world;
·
to
put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and
your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground;
·
to
see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind
their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy;
·
to
own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not
what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life;
·
to
close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look
around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness.
Are you willing to
do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas. Are you willing...
·
to
stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children;
·
to
remember the weakness and loneliness of people growing old;
·
to
stop asking how much your friends love you, and ask yourself whether you love
them enough;
·
to
bear in mind the things that other people have to bear in their hearts;
·
to
try to understand what those who live in the same home with you really want,
without waiting for them to tell you;
·
to
trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it
in front so that your shadow will fall behind you;
·
to
make a grave for your ugly thoughts, and a garden for your kindly feelings,
with the gate open—
Are
you willing to do these things, even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.
Are you willing...
·
to
believe that love is the strongest thing in the world—
·
stronger
than hate, stronger than evil, stronger than death—
·
and
that the blessed life which began in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is
the image and brightness of the Eternal Love?
Then you can keep
Christmas. And if you can keep it for a day, why not always?
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