[…] Respect, my dear Enrico, all honest religions. They are all forms of the ideal, they are all different paths that lead to the same goal. In this world, small as it is, men speak hundreds, nay thousands of tongues, and one and the same thought wears the garb of the most varied and foreign idioms. So it is with the need for the ideal: all men on earth feel it, but they satisfy it in different ways. Religions are so many languages of the ideal, with which we speak the same thought. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, let us all respect one another and love one another: from the vaults of Christian temples, from the minarets of mosques, from the gilt spires of synagogues, from the white roofs of Buddhist churches, issue songs and hymns, all raised up toward the same heavens. […] […]
Another great human value is that of our intelligence. One is born with a certain power of thought, but with education we can intensify it, above all make it nimbler, readier for all manner of agitations. In my garden you have seen those sturdy pine trees, and beside them their companions, frail and dying. All started out with the same capacity, but the different terrain in which they were planted and the different care with which they were raised has made them different. So it is with our mind; it grows and gathers strength with that cultivation known as instruction, and which in a broader sense is called education; whereas it weakens if abandoned to the sterile terrain of inertia and ignorance.
And then, beyond the degree of the mind’s power, if we enrich it with all that we learn, we are called a cultivated, or uncultured, or highly cultivated man; and thus a man’s intellectual value rises with the mass of his knowledge. First, however, it is necessary to have the capacity to elaborate all that gathered material, to order and arrange it, so that we can easily summon it and put it to the use of our talents, gradually, as we need it.
In line with this faculty, however, the value of thought grows with the amount of our knowledge. Every new science we learn is a key that opens new worlds to us, that reveals new regions to us, that enriches us with new strengths and new possibilities. So it is with every language, every art, every new industry that we add to our thought. […]
My dear Enrico, endow your life with the most you can of the ideal, if you wish to be content to live, if you do not want, like so many others, to curse life as a divine punishment. Every action of yours should be inspired by the heart and guided and corrected by reason. I have told you this several times, but need never repent of repeating myself:
The heart without the head is a sailboat without a rudder.
The head without the heart is a rudder without a sail.
Head and heart together spell the harmony of all energies, thought and feeling, signify an intelligent gentleman, that is, a perfect man.
The priests have surely taught you that there are three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and no doubt they have explained why these marvellous things are so. But I too, though no priest, have found that in practical life three theological virtues are needed, which are the fertile mothers of so many and so many other blessings.
These three basic virtues are honesty, work, and ideality.
Cultivate all three, my dear Enrico, and if you have learned nothing more than this from your old Uncle Baciccia, I think you will not have chattered with him in vain these many months.
An honest man who always works and always has an ideal in view is a happy man, a useful man, and, after living his own life, he can shut his eyes content with himself and with others. Whether we are great or small, weak or strong, rich or poor, geniuses or ordinary, we all have the right to be honest, to work, and to have a heaven to which to turn our gaze. Who shirks even one of these tasks violates the laws of nature, breaks the pact that binds the past to the future, and dearly pays the penalty for his own crime.
You, my dear Enrico, have a feeling heart and a clear head, and so I am sure that you will be honest, will always work, and will always have the heaven of the ideal over your head. […]