1. Always be kind and attentive to people in life. Do not scatter your property, affection, or advice; do not engage in indiscriminate charity. But strive to listen with sensitivity and to be able to come with true help at the right moment to those whom God sends your way as those in need. Be kind and generous.
2. Train yourself to do everything you undertake with clarity, grace, and precision; do not blur your actions, do not do anything tastelessly or carelessly. Remember, in “somehow” one can lose an entire life, whereas in clear, rhythmic execution, even of things and tasks of secondary importance, one may discover much that will later serve as the deepest source of new creativity.
3. He who does things carelessly will learn to speak carelessly, and a slovenly, blurred, unarticulated word drags thought into the same vagueness. My dear children, do not allow yourselves to think negligently. Thought is a divine gift and requires care. To be clear and precise in your thinking is the foundation of spiritual freedom and the joy of the mind.
4. I have long wanted to write this down: look at the stars more often. When your soul is troubled, look at the stars or at the blue sky during the day. When you are sad, when you are hurt, when things do not go well, when a storm rages within you—go outside and stay alone with the sky. Then your soul will find peace.
5. A holiday is a holiday; one cannot argue against it, but it is harmful and misguided to seek a constant holiday and replace daily life with it. Forgetting about everyday life or refusing to acknowledge it leaves one unsatisfied and unfulfilled—this is the mistake of many! Only in the quiet of peaceful daily work can one truly find oneself and a sense of fulfillment.
6. A circle of friends draws all attention to itself because friendships, in essence, are free of responsibility: each is accountable only for themselves, each is absorbed in their own interests. That is why it is easy. But this ease is the ease of emptiness, while the real, the true, demands effort, work, and carries responsibility. What a true home can give, no one and nothing else will ever provide—but one must earn it, one must be attentive to the home and not merely live in it as in a hotel.
7. Everything passes, yet everything remains. This is my deepest conviction—that nothing disappears completely, nothing is lost, but somehow, somewhere, it is preserved. Value endures, even if we cease to perceive it. And heroic deeds, even if forgotten by all, persist in some way and bear fruit. That is why, though the past may be mourned, there is also a living sense of its eternity. One does not part with it forever—only for a time. Without this, life would be meaningless and empty.
8. One must know how to live and how to embrace life by relying on what is here in the present rather than resenting what is absent. For the time wasted on dissatisfaction, no one and nothing will ever return.
