Love Your Life

However mean your life is, meet it and live it;

Do not shun it and call it hard names.

It is not so bad as you are.

It looks poorest when you are richest.

The fault-finder will find faults in paradise.

Love your life, poor as it is.

You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode;

The snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,

And have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

The town’s poor seem to me often to live the most in dependent lives of any.

May be they are simply great enough to receive without misgivings.

Most think that they are above being supported by the town;

but it often happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means,

which should be more disreputable.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herblike sage.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.

Turn the old, return to them.

Things do not change; we change.

Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The pure, the bright, the beautiful,

That stirred our hearts in youth,

The impulses to wordless prayer,

The dreams of love and truth;

The longing after something’s lost,

The spirit’s yearning cry,

The striving after better hopes

These things can never die.

The timid hand stretched forth to aid

A brother in his need,

A kindly word in grief’s dark hour

That proves a friend indeed ;

The plea for mercy softly breathed,

When justice threatens nigh,

The sorrow of a contrite heart

These things shall never die.

Let nothing pass for every hand

Must find some work to do ;

Lose not a chance to waken love

Be firm,and just ,and true;

So shall a light that cannot fade

Beam on thee from on high.

And angel voices say to thee

These things shall never die.