Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
EthicsLoveAmbitionExcellenceMediocrityProfessionalismStandardsValues
Some professional fields require strict impersonal standards for safety or consistency.
Poetry can be written only because it has been written.
The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is H…
What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.'
It is not Beauty I demand, A crystal brow, the moon's despair, Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand, Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair.
Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more.
Of course man is useful to man, because his body is a marvellous machine and his mind an organ of wonderful efficiency. But he is a spirit as well, and this sp…