With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XIX

-It is a risk to present yourself to others as you really are. It takes courage. Most people hide behind masks. They are afraid that if people always see them the way they really are, they won't like them. Therefore they always wear a mask. But in my experience people admire the courage of those who don't hide, who make themselves vulnerable, who dare to risk openly revealing themselves, expressing their hopes and their desires.
-Life is tough. It is tough even for the lucky.
-Life doesn't imitate television.
-Real men don't run. They stay and fight.
-One of this school's principal aims is to challenge you now so you will develop the confidence and toughness to face life's future challenges.
-It is precisely at that point when you are under the pressure of conflicting simultaneous demands, or when you are knocked down, face in the dirt, that you discover who you are. In that moment of truth you have to decide whether you are going to cut and run or stay and fight. If you have the courage to stay and fight you will have to dig deep within you to find the strength to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go on.
-Those who are really strong, who are really tough, don't deny the hurt, they don't pretend there's no pain. They face the hurt and pain and they struggle to get up and to go on.
-It is certainly a long-standing goal of this School to prepare a small group of young men who learn today courageously to face up to life's inevitable demands, setbacks, and injustices and who therefore will have developed the inner strength to be the world's leaders tomorrow.
-Nothing takes as much courage in life, as risking opening ourselves up to others.
-Only those who are strong will risk such vulnerability. Only the truly strong will dare to be tender.
-Every failure, every defeat, every bit of suffering that we experience makes us stronger. Stronger because we become more aware of the sufferings of others must bear.
-My beloved children, now and in the years ahead you will suffer and fail and know despair. My prayer for you is that when you experience such suffering you will dig deep and from your suffering  build the spiritual muscle you will need to cope with life's many difficulties, and that in your own suffering you will grow to understand with compassion the suffering of others.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XVIII

-Whatever power a leader has is overshadowed by the cares and responsibilities that go with leadership.
-If a leader has a vision, he cannot simply impose it.
-A leader must constantly, endlessly consult, listen, strive for consensus. Far from getting his own way, he must constantly seek the compromises that will bring people together. Far from getting his own way, a leader is constantly trying to understand the viewpoints of others and to persuade them to consider his own viewpoint.
-Leadership is about vision and courage.
-Leadership sometimes requires taking a lonely stand.
-A true leader has the inner strength to lose in a good cause rather than to win in a bad one.
-Leadership consists of just such tiny, quiet, and unspectacular acts.
-Leadership requires above all, character: the ability to cling to a vision, the patience and endurance to persuade others, a thick hide for criticism and unpopularity, a tolerance for anxiety, and a willingness to lose in a good cause, even a willingness to die for your fellow man in a righteous cause.
-At the heart of leadership is character.
-That's the reason we care most of all not how smart you are, not what a good athlete or musician or whatever you are, but what kind of person you are.
-Principle, not popularity, motivated Churchill to stand up to Hitler.
-Some adults who work with young people have a desperate need to be popular, to tell kids what they want to hear.
-Preemptive capitulation.
-Every age is an age of change in which people challenge the traditional values.
-The survival of civilization in every generation depends on a few institutions and individuals, depends on a small minority of people dedicated to working for the public good.
-These are the values we hold: honesty, simplicity, respect and concern for others, the acknowledgment of the Eternal in the midst of the transitory. Such values are never, in any generation, popular, but these are our values. The great schools stood unabashedly against the times and against the culture.
-The quality of life in each generation is determined by a very small number of people who dare to stand against the times, against the culture.
-This school was founded to create an elite of responsibility and obligation, not an elite of privilege.
-You are already different. You already live by values that relatively few young men your age share. In every generation the world is saved by a few people who stand for something: Socrates, Moses, Churchill, Rosa Parks, Mother Theresa.
-There is another way. It is the way of the few who want to do something great with their lives, who do not fear unpopularity, who dare to risk defeat and even death standing for what they believe in.
-Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
-That's the perfect definition of courage: to risk trying something that's worth trying that you are not already good at.
-It is a risk to say no to something that's wrong. Your peers may scorn you, reject you, make you feel alone and out of it. On the other hand, some may admire the inner strength that enables you to stand alone. Some may even join you. It's a risk one that requires courage.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XVII

-At the heart of every successful and enduring marriage is friendship.
-It takes two people to make a friendship.
-Vulnerability is the indispensable foundation and basis, the sine qua non, of friendship. No vulnerability, no friendship,
-Three qualities you can bring to a relationship that will help you make and keep a friend:
1. Hopeful commitment.
2.Openness.
3. Loyalty.
-There is no marriage, there is no friendship, in which there are not bad times. For worse is for real.
-We have made a hopeful commitment to care about another person at some cost to ourselves.
-Openness to differences in the first instance. Some people want their friends to look like them, dress like them, act like them, and share the very same interests. Such people are essentially narcissistic.
-One of the greatest joys of real friendship is to come to appreciate differences in others.
-Be open to differences. Be open also to change. All real friendships change and grow.
-Friendship must be based not on controlling but on caring.
-Loyalty: genuine and abiding concern for a person through thick and thin.
-Being loyal to another person does not mean we have to agree with him. Quite the contrary. Loyalty usually requires us to express our disagreement. But loyalty also requires that we express our disagreement to his face, not behind his back, and often privately.
-Friendship is defined by who you handle the disagreements that inevitably arise.
-When the chips are down, when things are for worse rather than for better, when things are poorer than for richer, we discover who our friends really are. Fair weather friends are not friends at all. Real friends are loyal even when it's costly to be loyal.
-As we begin this new year together, my prayer for you is that you will find the courage to risk making friends, and that, through commitment, openness and loyalty, above all, loyalty, you will experience the joy that comes from making and keeping friends.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XVI

-Self-absorption does not bring happiness.
-There is a great tendency in all of us to withdraw into ourselves, or into safe little cliques of like-minded people, to live sheltered, claustrophobic, risk-free, boring little lives.
-The supreme irony is that while self-absorption brings unhappiness, happiness results from self-risk, inconvenient involvement, self-sacrifice, and costly love.
-Manners are unnatural.
-We acknowledge each other's existence by calling one another by name.
-To the lowest circumstances in which a human being can find himself, no one can take away from you your fundamental civility and no one can take away from you that even higher virtue: the option, the right, to be kind.
-Three simple phrases: I am wrong; I'm sorry; Thank you.
-The happy people are those who assume nothing and who live each day aware of their good fortune, giving thanks for all they do enjoy, however little that may be. Happy are those who count their blessings.
-Even when you don't think people are looking, they often are.
-This boy had done the right thing over and over just because it was the right thing. He expected no reward and he was not aware that the whole time the manager was noticing everything he did.
-Honor and honesty are best.
-When you base your personal life or your career on honesty, you build on a rock that will anchor you through every storm.
-If you try to accomplish anything in life you will receive criticism.
-The people I have come to treasure most in my joy are those who love me enough to take me aside and say: 'That's not right' or 'That's not good enough' or 'I don't think you should say or do that'. I don't enjoy such criticism , and they don't enjoy giving it but I benefit from it.
-Could there be some truth in what they say?
-A moral person's duty is not just avoid sin, but also to avoid the occasions of sin.
-Don't blame others for not taking responsibility for your life. Take responsibility for your own life.
-People say if you like sixty percent of what you are doing in life you are lucky,.
-The goal of every life should be to grow in awareness.
-There are experiences in other fields that are not open to me because I live in too limited a world. We all do. For that reason we must be constantly, consciously seeking new experiences, risking changes in our routine.
-If you have high standards and values, you will at times have to be intolerant and judgmental in normal day to day life.
-If you have seen great works of art you will find it difficult to tolerate cheap, tawdry, and shallow art. If you have read the works of great authors, you will have a hard time tolerating junk. If you are men of integrity, you will have a hard time tolerating fellow workers who lie and cheat.
-Society needs your standards and values. Do not be intimidated into tolerating what is ugly, bad, and untrue. Eschew bad advice: Live life to the full, excessively, immoderately, with abandon. Take risks that will open you up to new experiences and thoughts; don't play it safe. And stand intolerantly for what is good and true and beautiful.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XV

-A loser is someone who doesn't have significant long-range goals for his life, and overall sense of purpose that gives his life meaning.
-It is only when you have worthwhile long-range goals that you are able to resist destructive pleasures day by day.
-The winner has two qualities: he has well-thought-out goals and the courage to pursue those goals.
-The winner has anticipated the rejection and with a positive attitude he sets about constructively trying to figure out how he can make specific college serve the larger purposes and goals of his life.
-Billy McDonald. I am going to fight it with everything I have. Through the ensuing months, the frequent returns to the hospital, he never said: 'Why me?'
-Life's winners have three great qualities:
1. They each remember to count their blessings.
2. They do not see life in terms of its obstacles, but in terms of its possibilities.
3. They are courageous.
-I was the only person in the country that day to go from Boston to Portland on the train.
-The essence of education is to lead people out of themselves.
-We are just not dying to read the next novel in English, or to learn the subjunctive in Latin, or to master the glories of Algebra. These things are unnatural. But most of us know that it is good for you and so you come along cheerfully with some semblance of enthusiasm.
-My prayer for you, then, is that you will risk suspending disbelief, that you will risk opening yourselves to new insights, which will lead you out of your confined outlook on life to delight in the new and broader and richer perspectives that are as yet behind you.
-To Jesus, no one was unimportant. Jesus did not divide people into categories, most important to least important. There were no little people to him. No one was contemptible to Jesus. No one was unworthy of his time. No one was unimportant. This was the rabbi who taught that 'he who wold be greatest among you must be the servant of all'
-What did Jesus mean when he said 'to receive the Kingdom of God like a child?
1. To be open and receptive.
2. To be honest about our feelings.
3. To let things go.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XIV

-I pray that, in your own lives, you will dare to have high hopes, not only in your relationships with others, but in what you do with your lives. Cast fear aside. Let your hope be divinely irresponsible. No risk of pain, no chance of gain.
-I plead guilty. Show no mercy. I don't regret a word of what I said. I accept the accusation of being an idealist as a crown upon my head, as the ultimate compliment. I rejoice in the accusation with my whole being.
-The principal reason for this school's existence is to advocate, advance, and inculcate in students certain great personal qualities.
-We care most of all what kind of person a boy is, because we believe that personal qualities are far more important than academic success in fitting students for public service. Three of those qualities are: discernment, vision, and courage.
-Discernment begins with ourselves, with self-awareness.
-Discernment extends beyond ourselves so that we become aware of and sensitive to the pain, the loneliness, the hurt in the lives of those around us. We are not all wrapped up in ourselves.
-A few things endure; most things do not endure. We seek at this school to bring you into contact with things so enduring that they deserve the name immortal.
-Our efforts here will have failed if you do not know yourselves, if you are not strong enough to see and control your temptations, if you are insensitive to the feelings of those around you. Our efforts here will have failed you if you do not grow in your awareness of the beauty and order of the universe and of the great achievements of your fellow men and women.
-Vision is the quality that enables us to look beyond the immediate, beyond the present, to see our lives in a larger context, to postpone gratification in order to achieve long-rage goals.
-The vision of the future gives you something to strive for now in the present.
-Important, though, as such a vision is, it is nothing like as important as an overall vision for your whole life.
-Such a vision must entail not only finding meaning in your life but meaning also in your inevitable death.
-Most people never seek or achieve such a vision. MATTHEW ARNOLD. Rugby Chapel, November 1857.

  What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about
Here and there, eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, 
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die,
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been...

-Winston Churchill, when asked what is the King of Virtues, instantly replied: Courage, because  it is the guarantor of all the others.
-It takes courage to seek a great vision for our lives and much greater courage to make the sacrifices along the way to follow that vision. It is easy to sit around whining and complaining and blaming. It takes courage to lead, to aspire to greatness.
-In any given generation there are only a few men and women of discernment, vision, and courage. Only a few. Only a few. Jesus said to his tiny band of apparently insignificant ragtag followers who went on to turn the world upside down: 'You are the salt of the earth'. A few tiny grains who could transform the taste of the whole meal. A few individuals of discernment, vision, and courage who could transform a whole society in their generation. The reason for this school's existence in every generation is to produce just such individuals, just such committees of one, who will be in their generation the salt of the earth.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XIII

-Love is acting patient on the outside with others when your are burning on the inside with some concern of your own.
-Love is often an act: it is the curbing of your own natural desires, it is willed caring for another person when you'd really like to be caring about your own needs.
-A lot of people will advise you to be your real self. It's terrible advice. Your real self is egocentric and self-seeking. Don't be your real self.
-When you put on the act of love, the first thing you do is to put yourself in the other person's place.
-It is because I love your so much that I've told you that your essay is atrocious. (Love is intolerant. If you love a person, you are sometimes intolerant of things he does and says).
-To be a good loser, to handle disappointment with class.
-Real happiness in life only comes to those who are able to care about others at some cost to themselves.
-That confrontation was the most important thing that ever happened to me. Your forced me to break out of my lifelong pattern of behavior. You made me act kind and patient, and I found I actually liked being kind and patient. By forcing me to change my behavior, you actually changed who I was on the inside.
-The outward practice of love leads to an inward disposition to love.
-If you want to be happy, then, you must learn to love: to pay the price of caring for others, of putting them first, of inconveniencing yourself.
-If you are condemned to death, if you discover you're going to die, you are strangely liberated.
-The prospect of death brings perspective, conveys a divine irresponsibility: we suddenly see how small our wold is, and we suddenly realize the unimportance of all the things we considered so important.
-Only a few in every generation go beyond the conventional to the daring.
-There is much, much more to life than striving. Life is more than getting, more than accumulating.
-A faith that takes into account life's shortness and life's deepest and most ultimate questions is the only faith that can bring us real happiness.
-If you never take any risks, you will never love. If you never make yourself vulnerable to another person, you will never get hurt. If you never attempt anything great, if you have never set big goals or  have high hopes, you will never be disappointed. But what a narrow and, frankly, cowardly way to live.

YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL - SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XII

-No age has believed no naively in inadequate faiths: the faith that promotion and success bring real happiness, the faith that pleasure brings real happiness, the faith that government money will solve the problems of society.
-Only the shepherds were aware that something significant had occurred. They were watching their flocks in the quiet of the night. They were listening. While the brightest and best, the important people, slept, it was the shepherds who heard the angel sing.
-Those who recognize their need, who are honest enough to see the emptiness and inadequacy of their lives, those who search for God in their need, always find him. The magi found the baby in the manger.
-The real beauty is beyond all its earthly imitations and representations, beyond all the earthly intimations and hints. It is at the top of Jacob's ladder. It is above the passing things of earth; it transcends time.
-God always nourishes those who stretch out their hands to him in longing hope. Such yearning always finds what it seeks.
-He who endures to the end shall be saved.
-God often sends in reinforcements to help just at the right moment.
-"He loved great things and thought little of himself". Balliol College at Oxford. Plaque in memory of one of the college tutors who died in an accident in Mount Blanc.
-How much grief we cause ourselves in life by assuming that everything will always go smoothly.
-Many people with very high I.Q's  are tremendous failures in life.
-Hope comes from the gut. Hope gives you the motivation to endure the hard work, the pain, the exhaustion that are part of any worthwhile endeavor. That's why hope is a virtue.
-God always answers prayer.
-Our deepest prayers are often not articulated in words.
-God gives us occasional glimpses into the meaning of things, in small, quiet ways.
-Hope is not optimism. Hope is realistic.
-All of you are going to die, some sooner, some later. What will they say about you? My prayer is that they will say about you what they said about Sir Robert Shirley: that in the worst of times you did the best things, and in the most calamitous of times you hoped the best things.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XI

-Much unhappiness in life seems to me to stem from the unwillingness of people to live with their decisions.
-If we really have made a wrong decision and are realistic about the opportunities a change might bring us, then we should correct our decision.
-Much of life's unhappiness is caused by our unwillingness to face up to the inevitable discouragements entailed in any one  of the lives we might choose.
-When we face the fact that every life worth living has its discouragements, its own unfairness if you like, we have then taken a giant step towards happiness.
-In any life worth living, we will be hurting much of the time.
-As we mature, we acquire the faith, the perspective, that the discouragements, the injuries, cannot break us, cannot make us lose sight of the great things we are determined to achieve.
-Faith grows stronger and stronger every time we overcome discouragement and pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and go on.
-Each discouragement is a test, each discouragement overcome is a victory.
-"Blessed is the man who falls into divers kinds of trials, knowing that the testing of this faith will produce the spirit of endurance and endurance will enlarge and confirm this faith.
-We feel downhearted or empty, when we lose our sense of the meaning and purpose of our lives.
-"From time to time, almost every thoughtful and reflective person walks through life's valleys. Such experiences of depression and despair are natural to people who labor strenuously to achieve something important. The issue is not so much that you are depressed as what you are going to do about being depressed."J.S. Bezzant. Father Jarvis tutor at Cambridge University.
-Three tactics in dealing with depression:
1. Don't run.
2. Take one step at a time.
3. Find and keep the vision.
-Be honest with yourself. Don't run away. Don't pretend, don't wait for it to pass. Don't be passive.
-We have to quiet down and listen if we are to find the center of our lives.
-If the search for what is good and true and beautiful begins with emptiness, it continues to be a hard journey, a long and arduous search, through encounters not only with the Herods of this world, but even worse, with our own inward sense of despair, that terrible sense that the whole journey is not worth it.
-If we are somehow able to leave behind what is known and comfortable, and undertake the journey in search of life's meaning, we must realize that the journey will be arduous, filled with discouragement and despair, filled with the voices singing in our ears, saying that the search is folly. We must somehow sustain hope, as the wise men did, when in the depths we lose all sight of the star. And we must expect, like the wise men, that we shall never experience great joy until we have suffered many sorrows.
-They departed to their own country another way.
-Get  every penny of this and take it to Mrs. Harriger. Tell her you are sorry. Tell her you will work for her every day in the garden for the remainder of the summer.
-I knew there would be no supper.
-At about 8:30 my father came up as always to hear my prayers. He sat as always at the foot of the bed. As always I rendered my prayers to God and my father. At the end there was a short silence, which I pathetic and pitiable, broke by saying: I am sorry, Daddy. I know he said and ran his fingers through my hair. And then he arose and returned down the stairs.
The power that two little words can have: I know, he said. What more any of us want if life than to be understood? Those two small words conveyed to me that he somehow understood how I could do something so terrible. That he understood that I was sorry. I was no longer alone. And the power of a tiny gesture, his fingers through my hair. Despite my crime, I was not only understood, I was loved.
Two small words and one small gesture and the whole universe was again set right. I lay back upon my pillow and slept the profound sleep of one who is at peace.
-People who don't care about you don't take the trouble to rebuke you. Most people avoid such confrontations. They simply don't give you the raise or the promotion, and you never find out why.
-I worked for Old Lady Harriger every day for the rest of the summer. The punishment was not reduced. The hours were not shortened. Not a penny of my money was returned. I was not let off easy. And for that I am glad because I felt by summer's end that I had paid for my sins. And that's a great feeling.
-Now that he is gone and I can't thank him, I thank God that my father loved me so much that he did not spare me the pain, the loneliness, the desolation, by which alone I could grow to become a better and stronger person.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes X

-It is always a losing battle to fight against things you cannot change.
-In my experience, it is foolish to expect things to go well.
-In the world, said Jesus, you shall have tribulation.
-The happy adolescent, the happy adult, is pessimistic: he expects that things will not turn out as he hopes.
-I urge you to hold onto high hopes, to aspire to great things. But I also urge you to be pessimists: to expect things to go badly, to go wrong; to expect that many of your hopes will not be realized. Much of the immense happiness I feel in my own life comes from being a hopeful pessimist. If you are a hopeful pessimist, you will again and again be surprised by joy when some of your hopes are, in fact, realized.
-Accept what you can't change. Expect the worst. Make and inventory of your worries.
-I am talking about prayer from the heart, prayer that is often beyond words, prayer that is offered with our whole being.
-There are people you care more about even than you care about yourself. This usually happens when you have children of your own.
-It is a tough world out there, and to live in that tough world a boy needs to gain the self-confidence that he can face up to burdensome responsibilities on his own. He needs to realize that he is tough enough to handle his own problems, to survive on his own.
-I say this not to demoralize you; I say it because it's a reality and we need to base our lives on reality.
-Life spares no one. Every one of us has weaknesses. Every one of us is vulnerable and has to deal with lack of drive and failure and disappointment.
-The trophies we long to win often turn to dust even as we clasp them in triumph.
-Socrates said the wisest man is the one who realizes how little he knows. I submit that the strongest and toughest and most self-sufficient man is the one who realizes how vulnerable and frail he is.
-The beginning of wisdom is the realization that, if you want to stand on your two feet, you must learn to kneel on your own two knees. 

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes IX

-What can you possible say to young people as they look to the future?
-At this point all David had was faith, his believe that the God who had delivered him from danger in the past would show him a way now in the present.
-What can I do? I am not brilliant or handsome or powerful. I don't have the necessary training.
-With quiet and abiding trust in God, David persisted in the face of this universal contempt.
-They dared to face the contempt heaped on them. They dared trust that the Living God could use their apparently insignificant lives to overcome the strutting and powerful giant. And it turned out that they were the realistic ones, and it was they who prevailed.
-The world is filled with people like the army of Saul and the Israelites in the wilderness who stand around wringing their hands in despair and assuring everyone that nothing can be done.
-Jesus of Nazareth commanded no army, held no public office, knew none of the influential people of his time, never even went to college or achieved success in business. He was put to death, silenced as a nuisance. His few followers scattered in fear and despair. And yet this single person has had a more powerful impact than anyone in all of history. He was armed only with a single weapon: love.
-I do not feel sorry for you, I do not despair about the future that you have to face. I do not wring my hands in dismay about what lies ahead for you. In all of history, there has never been a more thrilling time to be alive than this moment. Humanity faces the greatest crisis it has ever faced. Nothing less that the survival of the human race is at stake.
-In that moment of temptation remember David. Remember David's faith, ridiculed as naive and unrealistic by everyone from his brothers to the king. Remember Moses and Jesus. Remember the Davids of every generation: Rosa Parks and Desmond Tutu, the few in every generation who believed that the Living God could use even their pathetically tiny talents to challenge the giant evils of their time.
-I do not despair for you. I rather rejoice. Times of maximum danger provide maximum opportunity. If our time is the most dangerous time in all of the history, it is also the most sublime. Some of you who are sitting here this morning will find the faith and courage to place your lives in the service of the Living God confident that He can use what little you have in his great purpose. And like David, in his service you shall prevail.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes IX

-My unwillingness to suspend disbelief deprived me of the beauty of classical music. If you begin with the assumption that there is no meaning, you will find none.
-Thoughtful people down the ages have suspended disbelief and looked and listened for clues that life has meaning. We see such longing and seeking in the three wise men, the three privileged, affluent, well-educated Roxbury Latin graduates of the ancient world, who left all the luxury and security of their homes to follow a star that led them to the baby Jesus at Bethlehem.
-The search for meaning in life is often difficult, costly, and discouraging. And there will always be a nihilist to tell you that the journey is folly. And yet, somehow the three wise men persisted in their search, continued their arduous journey believing, in spite of all the hardships, in spite of the cynics who told them: 'This was all folly', that they would find something worth finding. And what did they find? A baby. Not at all what they expected, not at all what they thought they would find.
-I remind you of this story of the three wise men because its subject is man's deepest longing: the longing for meaning. You cannot even begin to search for life's meaning unless you hope and believe there is something to find. You cannot even begin to search for life's meaning unless you suspend disbelief.
-That is what we are all seeking, whether we know it or not: a deeper union, a deeper communion, with something beyond all the passing things of life: beyond grades, beyond college admission, beyond even a good job or a good wife.
-Death is the only certainty in life; each of our journeys leads to death.
-We must live with our bags always packed.
-You can never see or hear anything beautiful if you don't suspend disbelief, stop, look, and listen.
-Everything is cold, everything is dead. But when we come out here next summer, it will all be lush and green: the trees in full leaf, grapes ripening on the vines. You have to wait, but then Good brings back life from death. Winter can be long and dark, but in God's good time, it always gives way to spring.
-Those who managed to hold on owed their survival more to spiritual than to physical strength. They believed there was a reason to live despite of the apparent hopelessness of their lives and they held on.
-Your own life, like everybody else's, will have troubles, bleak periods when the landscape of death seems to destroy the hope that spring will ever come. Sometimes in life, you have just to hold on.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes VIII

-Every great school in every age has always regarded the awareness of death as the foundation stone of education.

-Are you preparing Henry for a political career?
-No, he said.
-Well, for a professional career?
-No, he replied.
-For a business career, then?
-No, he repeated.
-Well, in a word, Dr. Alington, what are you here at Eton preparing Henry for?
-I a word, madam? Death.

-When you finally face with courage the reality that nothing in this world endures, you instinctively reach out for what does endure and for what provides meaning, for the reality beyond what can be seen and heard and felt and smelled.
-Happiness comes not by focusing on yourself, your needs, your rights, your advancement, but on the needs of others.
-Roxbury Latin boys have always been different. 'Your school may be small and it doesn't recruit athletes, but you have the toughest kids'. You are different. You are, many of you, rebels against the spirit of your age. The best people in every generation always have been. They are a minority, but they change the world and they have the happiest, most fulfilling, and most exciting lives. Roxbury Latin boys have always dared to be different, to go against the pack.
-Others first, others second, myself last.
-They were closest friends, but there was no hugging, no kissing, no tears as there would be today. Hugging, kissing, crying were regarded as inappropriate.
-Nihilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes VII

-If parents are paying a lot of money and boys are working hard, then everything should work out and there should not be any problems: hard work should be rewarded with good grades and success in extracurriculars; everything should go well. Life is not fair.
-Getting cut was among the most valuable experiences I had as a boy. It prepared me well for the reality of life. For life brings many disappointments and defeats.
-A high school should prepare its students for life.
-Cope with the disappointments of school life, you learn how to deal wit the setbacks that follow in later life.
-It is an obscenity to confuse disappointment with tragedy.
-Every disappointment, every setback you will have in life is an opportunity for growth.
-Every time you make a choice in life, you necessarily rule out other choices you might have made. Every time you make one choice, you give up other choices. Every choice involves pain. That's the way life is.
-There is a great tendency to focus on our problems. Count your blessings.
-I was closed to many of life's possibilities, not open to understanding things more deeply, convinced there was nothing there.
-The very hairs on your head are numbered.
-The path to the abundant life, my dear children, is not simple or easy or exact. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
-Their son's rejection by their number one choice college was not really a tragedy.
-A school that prepares students for life has, I believe, a twofold mission: first, to remind students of the stark reality that life is short and ends in death; and second, to help students gain some insight into the meaning and purpose of their short and fleeting earthly lives.
-Only those who have the courage to see life in the perspective of death, only those who understand that life is short, can be truly happy.

With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes VI

-That's the way it is, is the reality that there is no free lunch in life, the reality that you cannot have your cake and eat it too, the reality that you have responsibility for your own life and not built-in right to have someone take care of you if you mess up.
-We are living in a time when most talk is about rights and very little about responsibility, when most talk is about getting what we deserve and very little about our duty to others.
-That is the theme of our age, rights without consequences, the willingness to stand up for something as long as it doesn't cost us anything.
-The basic problem this boy had, of course, was his parents, who by their unwillingness to have the boy face the consequences of his actions all his life, had bred a son who really believed he could do whatever he wanted without any bad consequences.
-In addition to the right to live without consequences and the right to live without guilt, it is also more and more frequently asserted nowadays that it is our right to have a good and happy outcome whenever we work hard to achieve something.
-There is not right in life to a good outcome.
-The secret to happiness in life: courage, sacrifice, and gratitude.
-If you want to be happy, you must begin not with rights but with responsibilities: with the courage to face reality, the courage to attempt great things at the risk of losing, the courage to lose bravely, the courage to suffer with patience, the courage to tell the truth.
If you want to be happy, you will find happiness arises not so much from getting your way and asserting your rights as it does from sacrificing your rights, sacrificing your time and treasure for the sake of others.
If you want to be happy, you will find happiness not from dwelling on all you do not have in life and feeling bitter about it. You will find happiness by dwelling on all that is good and true and beautiful in your life and being thankful for it.