Raymond Winter’s Philosophy

My philosophy is simple:
I will not do harm to anyone and I hope no one will do harm to me. Doing good and helping people is like a circle. Good thoughts, good attitude and goodness will always come back to the person who starts off doing good.

Try to remember and truly believe that:

Your life is important.
You can make a difference.
You are special.
Your life has meaning.

Trying to help people every day, in some small way, makes me happy.
-Sir Raymond Winters

My father, Sir Jason, has always been the most influential person to me. Below are a few ideals that have also helped shape my life.

The Road Not Taken
– by Robert Frost –

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh.
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

“IF” by Rudyard Kipling

One of the fondest memories I have of my father was when I was twelve. My dad gave me this poem and told me if I could memorize it he would give me two dollars. I originally did it because I wanted the two dollars, but as I memorized the poem the words meant something to me. I realized that this was how my father was trying to lead his life and his father before him. As I got older I discovered just what these words really meant. Now that my father is gone, it means more to me than ever.

Written by an Englishman, born in India in 1865, the poem is relevant today. I have read this many times throughout my life. My Son, J, Raymond Winters III will be 12 in May. I will give this to him then.

“IF”

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

Richard III

When I joined the Army, my father read this to me. He had also served in the very regiment I was to join.

From Shakespeare – Richard III
Before a big battle… Maybe a hopeless one.

This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
– by Robert Frost –

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

My Favorite quotes and thoughts from Mahatma Gandhi

Good and Evil

– Satan’s snares are most subtly laid and are the most tempting when the dividing line between right and wrong is so thin as to be imperceptible. T-2-55

– Satan mostly employs comparatively moral instruments and the language of ethics to give his aims an air of respectability. T-2-17

– Satan’s successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips. MM-231

– God rules even where Satan seems to hold sway, because the latter exists only on God’s sufferance. T-7-147

War

– War knows no law except that of might. T-7-144

– When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books. T-2-6

– Exploitation and domination of one nation over another can have no place in a world striving to put an end to all war. T-7-2

Source: Mahatma Gandhi [Last phase, Vol. II (1958), P. 65].

Shylock

When I was at the club in Las Vegas, in the sauna with Sir Jason, a gentleman came in and started talking about people, races and Jewish people. He asked openly what was a Jew and what did they look like. I remembered this from school and recited it word for word. When I was done, he just left without a word. As a Christian person, I have trouble with that kind of thinking.

Shylock by William Shakespeare

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Vince Lombardi

“Winning is not a sometime thing: it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

Innocents Abroad
– by Mark Twain –

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

My philosophy is simple:
Trying to help people every day,
in some small way, makes me happy

-Sir Raymond Winters