Process Imagining

— What is the most important thing for you in life?
— The ability of a person to live his own life, and not someone else’s, in other words, to develop his own values, and not be guided by what is imposed on him, no matter how attractive they may seem to him. First of all, everyone should know what he is in purely human categories, and then in national, political, and religious categories.
— What do you value most in a person?
– The ability to forgive, the ability to feel sorry. The most common feeling I have towards people – and this may seem trivial – is pity. Probably because we are all finite.

— Joseph Brodsky, from an interview