Lights Along the Road

Words From the Early 1900s on How to Live, and Their Echoes Around the World

Before You Begin

Some sentences stay with us for a whole lifetime. We read them once, perhaps on a wall, in an old book or in a letter, and years later they come back at exactly the moment we need them. They do not tell us everything. They are more like small lights along a road at night: each one shows only a short stretch of the way, but together they help us keep walking.

This book gathers fifty-seven such lights. All of them come from the first half of the twentieth century, from the year 1900 to the year 1944. It was a time of great change. Electric light reached ordinary homes, cars and aeroplanes appeared, and letters and newspapers travelled faster than ever before. It was also a time of two world wars, of illness and hunger, and of many people who had to rebuild their lives again and again. Perhaps this is why so many people of those years thought hard about one simple question: how should a person live?

Their answers came from many parts of the world and from many kinds of lives. Here you will meet poets and scientists, teachers and a nurse, a pilot, a monk, a young girl who kept a diary, a philosopher who wrote in a soldier's notebook and a poet who wrote in a sickbed. Some were famous in their own time. Some were almost unknown until long after their death. They wrote in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Russian and English. What surprised me, again and again, is how often they agreed.

That is the second thread of this book. Next to each saying, I have placed two echoes: similar words from other times and other places. Some are much older, from ancient teachers in East Asia, South Asia, Africa and Europe. Some are traditional sayings that no single person wrote, passed on by many generations. When a poet of the 1920s and a teacher of two thousand years ago say nearly the same thing in different languages, it is worth listening. It suggests that we have found something true about being human.

How This Book Is Arranged

The chapters follow the order of time. The first chapter begins in 1900, and the last one ends in 1944. Where we know the exact year in which the words were written or spoken, the chapter stands in that year. Where the year is not known, the chapter stands where the speaker's life places it. In this way, you can read the book as a walk through the first half of the century, and watch how the world changed around the people who spoke.

Every chapter follows the same five steps. First come the words themselves and where they were written. Then comes the life behind the words, because a saying means more when we know who said it and why. Then I ask what the words ask of us. After that come similar words from around the world. Finally, there is a short part about living the words today, with one small thing you can try.

You can read the book from beginning to end, or open it anywhere. Some readers like to read one chapter a day, with a morning cup of tea or before sleep. Some like to choose a saying for the week and carry it in their pocket. The words do not change, but we do. A sentence that seems simple at twenty may open like a door at fifty, and again, differently, at eighty. So it is never too early and never too late to meet them.

About the Words in This Book

Famous words travel easily, and on the way they often change. Many short sayings that are printed on posters and shared on screens under a famous name cannot be found in anything that person wrote. I have not used such sayings. Every saying in this book comes from a person who died long ago, and every one is given with the work, the letter, the speech or the poem where it can be found, and with its year.

Most of these people did not write in English. Their words are given here in my own plain paraphrase, which tries to keep their meaning without copying any published translation. When the person wrote in English, a short line may appear in their own wording. In a few chapters, the well-known form of a saying is not quite what the person wrote, and I say so, because the real words are often even more interesting than the famous version.

Some of the people in this book lived through very hard times, and a few of them died young. I have told their stories briefly and gently. This is a hopeful book, but its hope is not the kind that looks away from trouble. It is the hope of people who saw trouble clearly and still chose to say something good about life. Let us begin, then, with the first light, lit in the year 1900.

Chapter 1: Kindness as the Heart of Good Manners

The Words: Nitobe Inazō, 1900

The first light in this book was written in English by a man who did not grow up speaking it. In 1900, Nitobe Inazō published a short book called Bushido, which explained the old moral code of the warrior class of his homeland in East Asia to readers in Europe and the Americas. In its chapter on politeness, he warns that good manners can become empty. Politeness, he writes, "is a poor virtue" if it comes only from a fear of offending good taste. It should be the outward sign of "a sympathetic regard for the feelings of others". In my own words: a polite act is worth something only when there is care behind it. Bowing, thanking and choosing gentle words are like the shape of a cup. What matters is what the cup holds.

The Life Behind the Words

Nitobe Inazō was born in 1862, when the old world of the warriors he later described was coming to an end. He studied agriculture and economics, learned English well as a young man and went abroad to study further. He became a teacher and a scholar, and he cared deeply about education, including education for women; later in life he led a college for women. He wrote Bushido in English while he was resting from an illness, far from home, and the book was soon read and translated in many parts of the world.

Nitobe spent much of his life standing between two worlds and helping each to understand the other. He was a Christian, a member of a quiet and peace-loving community of faith, and he believed that good people in every land shared the same deep values. After the First World War he worked for several years for the League of Nations, the new international body that hoped to keep peace between peoples. This life explains his words. For a man who spent so much time among strangers, manners were not decoration. They were bridges, and a bridge is only useful if it really reaches the other side.

What the Words Ask of Us

Nitobe's words ask us to look honestly at why we are polite. Sometimes we say "thank you" because we are grateful. Sometimes we say it because we fear what others will think if we do not. The second kind of politeness is not wrong, but it is thin. It protects our own image more than it serves the other person. Nitobe asks for the first kind: courtesy that begins with noticing how someone else feels and wanting to make that feeling a little lighter.

Imagine a young man named Tomas who works at the counter of a busy post office. All day he says the same polite phrases. One afternoon an old woman comes in, confused by a form, her hands shaking slightly. Tomas could deal with her quickly and correctly, with all the right words. Instead he slows down, turns the form towards her and explains it line by line in a calm voice. His words are the same as always. What has changed is the regard behind them, and the woman leaves feeling that someone really saw her.

Similar Words From Around the World

About two and a half thousand years ago in East Asia, the teacher Confucius gave advice that is still repeated everywhere. In the Analects, the collection of his sayings, he says in my own words: do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself (Analects 12.2, and again in 15.24). Nitobe's idea of politeness grows from the same root. Both men begin with imagination: picture yourself in the other person's place. Confucius gives the rule in its simplest form, and Nitobe shows how it can live inside the smallest daily gestures.

In South Asia, the Tirukkural, a collection of short couplets in the Tamil language traditionally credited to the poet Thiruvalluvar, has a vivid picture for the same lesson. Couplet 100 says that using harsh words when kind ones are at hand is like eating unripe fruit when ripe fruit is right there. This echo adds something practical. Kind words are not rare or expensive; they are usually within reach. Choosing a harsh word instead is a strange choice, like picking the sour fruit for no reason at all.

Living It Today

Nitobe's words can help anyone, whatever their day looks like. A student can thank a teacher and mean it. A parent can say "please" to a child with the same respect they would show an adult. Someone who works with customers can let one polite sentence each day come from real attention rather than habit. Someone who lives alone can put warmth into a short call or a note to a friend.

This week, try one small experiment. Before a polite word that you say often, pause for one breath and think about the feelings of the person in front of you. Then say it. The words will be the same, but you may find that they travel further. This is how the century's first light begins: with a small kindness, carried by an ordinary word.