A Literary Prescription for

Values

For working out what you actually stand for, and whether you are living like it.

Most people can produce a list of their values in about ninety seconds, and most of those lists are aspirational rather than accurate. The real ones show up elsewhere: in where the money goes, what makes you disproportionately angry, what you refuse to do even when it would be simpler, and the choices you make when there is nobody to see them. Which is why this is uncomfortable territory. It is easy to hold a value and much harder to notice you have been quietly trading it for years, for a salary or a marriage or a reputation. These books, poems and quotes are for the whole of that: working out what you actually believe rather than what you were handed, spotting the gap between the stated and the lived, and deciding what you are prepared for it to cost.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Four of these come at the question directly: a Quaker educator listening for what his life was telling him, a psychologist on how moral instincts actually form, a Roman emperor talking himself round, and a Harvard course arguing that values are trained rather than discovered. The stories supply the test, because a value is only visible when holding it costs somebody something.

Let Your Life Speak

Parker J. Palmer · 2000

Palmer’s premise is that most of us set out with a picture of the life we ought to want, spend twenty years pursuing it, and only discover our actual values by way of the breakdown that follows. He had two severe depressions and writes about them plainly. His phrase for the work is listening for what your life is already telling you rather than deciding what to make of it. A hundred pages, and unusually quiet for a book on this subject.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan · 2021

Bill Furlong delivers coal in an Irish town in 1985, finds a girl locked in the convent coal shed, and has to decide whether to be the one person who does not look away. Keegan does it in under a hundred and twenty pages and never once uses the word conscience. It is the finest thing here on what values actually are: not the ones you would list if asked, but the ones you turn out to hold when it will cost you something.

The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt · 2012

Haidt’s central finding is uncomfortable and worth sitting with: we do not reason our way to our values, we arrive at them intuitively and then hire our reason to argue the case. He maps the handful of moral foundations that different people weight differently, which explains a great deal about why decent people find each other incomprehensible. Contested in places, and still the most useful book for understanding why you believe what you believe.

A Man for All Seasons

Robert Bolt · 1960

Thomas More will not swear the oath, and the whole play is everybody he loves explaining, reasonably and with genuine affection, why he should. Bolt is not interested in More as a saint. He is interested in the point at which a person finds there is something they cannot do, and in how expensive that discovery is for everyone standing near them. It reads in an evening and the arguments stay with you for years.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius · c.180

A Roman emperor’s private notebook, never meant for anybody else, and largely him reminding himself of the same handful of things: do the work in front of you, do not be ruled by the opinion of people you would not ask for advice, be the same in private as in public. It is here rather than on a page about philosophy because that is what a value actually looks like in practice — something you have to keep telling yourself.

The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead · 2019

Two boys in a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s, one of whom believes that behaving well will eventually be recognised and one of whom does not. Whitehead sets the two positions against each other without stacking the deck, and the ending rearranges everything. Based on a real institution. Difficult, short, and the most serious test here of whether holding to a principle is worth what it costs.

The Path

Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh · 2016

A Harvard course on Chinese philosophy, written up for people who have not read any. The argument that makes it useful here is the one running against the modern advice to look inward and find your true self: Confucius and Mencius thought you become who you are by what you repeatedly do, and that values are trained rather than discovered. A genuinely different way of approaching the question.

Poems about values and integrity

Three arguments for keeping your own counsel

A diplomat who had watched twenty years of people hoping to rise and fearing to fall, a satirist on why the costume is not the person, and a broke exciseman dismissing rank, money and the worship of hundreds inside eight lines.

from “The Character of a Happy Life”

Sir Henry Wotton, 1614

How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another’s will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!
…
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.

Wotton spent twenty years as an ambassador and knew exactly how much of public life runs on hoping to rise and fearing to fall. The last two lines are the whole argument and they are worth testing against your own week: how many of the things you did were done because of what somebody might think, and how many because you actually meant them.

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from “An Essay on Man”

Alexander Pope, 1734

Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Fortune in men has some small diff’rence made,
One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade;
The cobbler apron’d, and the parson gown’d,
The friar hooded, and the monarch crown’d.

Pope in couplets is a machine for making an argument unforgettable, and this one has survived three hundred years because it is portable. It does not say your position does not matter. It says your position is not where the honour is kept. Everything else in the passage is costume — the apron, the gown, the hood, the crown — and he lists them deliberately in that order.

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from “A Man’s a Man for A’ That”

Robert Burns, 1795

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man’s a man for a’ that.
…
Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that.

Burns wrote this a year before he died, broke and working as an exciseman, and it is the plainest statement of a value anybody has managed in Scots or English. Rank, money and the worship of hundreds are all dismissed inside eight lines. What is left is the only measure he will accept, and he repeats it until you cannot forget it: a man’s a man for all that.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about values to keep

Short lines for the decision you have been circling all week.

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

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Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

C.S. Lewis

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If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.

Peter Marshall

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Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

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You find out what you actually value on the day it costs you something. Everything before that is a preference.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Quiet enough to hear yourself

A few short practices, mostly because it is very difficult to tell your own view from everybody else’s while the room is still loud.

How to Tell What’s Really Meant for You

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A reflective talk on listening past the noise to sense what genuinely fits your life, and what does not.

Listen Now For Free

Embracing Your True Self

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A guided practice for setting aside who you think you should be, and returning gently to the person you actually are.

Listen Now For Free

How to Stop Seeking Validation from Other People

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On stepping off the treadmill of approval, which is generally where the difference between your values and other people’s begins to show.

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The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — quiet enough to hear what you actually think, which is harder to come by than it sounds.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Values

Where should I start?

Start with Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, which is a hundred pages and takes the quietest possible approach: listening for what your life is already telling you rather than deciding what to make of it. If you would rather have a story than an argument, Small Things Like These is under a hundred and twenty pages and never uses the word conscience once.

How do I work out what my values actually are?

Not by listing them, which produces a flattering answer every time. Look instead at where your money and your hours actually go, at what makes you disproportionately angry, and at the times you did the harder thing when nobody would have known. Haidt is worth reading here for an uncomfortable finding: we tend to arrive at our values by instinct and hire our reasoning afterwards to defend them.

Which quotes about values are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “It is not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are” (Roy E. Disney), “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching” (C.S. Lewis) and “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value” (Albert Einstein). You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

What if my values have changed?

Then you have been paying attention. People generally acquire their first set wholesale, from a family or a faith or a profession, and then something happens that does not fit and the set has to be rebuilt from the parts that survived. That is not a betrayal of who you were. It is usually the first time the values are genuinely yours rather than issued.

Values

Prescribed reading

Three arguments for keeping your own counsel

Quotes about values to keep

Quiet enough to hear yourself

Reading for Values

Where should I start?

How do I work out what my values actually are?

Which quotes about values are worth keeping?

What if my values have changed?

More prescriptions await.