I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity. I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not - more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving.
Interpretation
True serenity comes from focusing on loving others instead of seeking their love.
In this quote, Beverly Sills reflects on reaching a stage of personal maturity where external validation becomes less significant. She emphasizes that genuine contentment arises not from being loved, but from the ability to love others, which transforms one's perspective on life into one of selflessness and generosity.
In practice
This quote can inspire a community service event focused on helping others.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
There is no shortcut to anyplace worth going.
...maximize the serendipity around you.
Your days pass like rainbows, like a flash of lightning, like a star at dawn. Your life is short. How can you quarrel?
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?
I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.
Keep my word positive. Words become my behaviors. Keep my behaviors positive. Behaviors become my habits. Keep my habits positive. Habits become my values. Keep my values positive. Values become my destiny.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
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