Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how positive traits like generosity and courage can become especially pronounced during difficult times.
Nancy Gibbs suggests that just as viruses can spread rapidly in certain conditions, so too can virtues such as generosity and courage. During moments of crisis or catastrophe, people often exhibit heightened levels of these qualities, illustrating a collective human response to adversity that fosters support and bravery in the face of challenges.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of community support during natural disasters.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.
He who knows best knows how little he knows.
We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.
In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions.
Of all human lamentations, without doubt, the most common is if only I had known. But we can't know, and so days of death and fire so often begin no differently than those of love and warmth.
It is of no profit to have learned well, if you neglect to do well.
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