“pride, principle, poise, and purpose” When all is said and done and your final life script has been written and submitted for review, these are the only human character entities that authentically matter. Nothing else. Nothing more nuanced or multi-layered or esoteric. Nothing hiding in the attic or in a secret crawl-space or somewhere unobvious—lost between cracks and covert niches and camouflaged nearly to death. Pride, principle, poise, and purpose. If you live your life constantly tethered to these four foundational paragons—using them and them alone as the buoys to guide your one-time odyssey across a vast, pitch black, uncharted temporal body of water—you will never have anything to be ashamed of. In the big, BIG scheme of things—the only scheme which ultimately matters, in other words—pride, principle, poise, and purpose rule the day and define you as a person and noble denizen of Earth; nothing else even comes close, nor should it.
Fred's Soapbox 