Give Part of Yourself Away
哈罗德·泰勒 \/ Harold Taylor
We are living in one of those periods in human history which are marked by revolutionary changes in all of man’s ideas and values. It is a time when every one of us must look within himself to find what ideas, what beliefs, and what ideals each of us will live by. And unless we find these ideals, and unless we stand by them firmly, we have no power to overcome the crisis in which we in our world find ourselves.
I believe in people, in sheer, unadulterated humanity. I believe in listening to what people have to say, in helping them to achieve the things which they want and the things which they need. Naturally, there are people who behave like beasts, who kill, who cheat, who lie and who destroy. But without a belief in man and a faith in his possibilities for the future, there can be no hope for the future, but only bitterness that the past has gone. I believe we must, each of us, make a philosophy by which we can live. There are people who make a philosophy out of believing in nothing. They say there is no truth, that goodness is simply cleverness in disguising your own selfishness. They say that life is simply the short gap in between an unpleasant birth and an inevitable death. There are others who say that man is born into evil and sinfulness and that life is a process of purification through suffering and that death is the reward for having suffered. There are others who say that man is a kind of machine which operates according to certain laws, and that if you can learn the laws and seize the power to manipulate the machine, you can make man behave automatically to serve whatever ends you have in mind.
I believe these philosophies are false. The most important thing in life is the way it is lived, and there is no such thing as an abstract happiness, an abstract goodness or morality, or an abstract anything, except in terms of the person who believes and who acts. There is only t