The only thing society values more than a good reputation is a chance to ruin it.
From The Care of the Self, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The man who feeds the ducks by the boat ramp did not come Tuesday, and the talk along the fence was that he had been asked not to. Nobody could say by whom, or what for, but everybody had a version, and each version had been improved a little in the telling. I had thought for years that people hoard a neighbor's good name the way they hoard anything scarce, carefully, as a kind of savings. Wednesday taught me otherwise: the only thing society values more than a good reputation is a chance to ruin it. He was back Thursday with the same bag of corn and the same hat, and the fence had already moved on to someone else. What I keep turning over is how pleased they sounded, all of them, the whole two days.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- Birds sing "Stay out of my space!" so sweetly that no one ever takes offense.
- By the time most of us begin to know ourselves, there seems too much to know.
- Others don’t get to define you unless you let them.
- It's hard to win a tug-of-war with yourself.
- We want others to see in us qualities we do not believe we possess.
- If people knew how to be truly selfish, we would live in a more generous world.