On Valentine’s Day, don’t give chocolates, give an act of kindness!  At the NYPL, our job is to help you better yourself. We hope this also translates into you passing on the goodwill to your friends, family and community members.

So, let’s help reboot Monday as Generosity Day (the brainchild of Sasha Dichter)!   Examples of great things to do on #generosityday:

• Give money to….a street musician, a homeless person, your favorite charity

• Take old clothes from your closet and give them to goodwill

• Leave a $5 tip for a $2 coffee

• Introduce yourself to someone you see every day but have never said hello to

• Bring in lunch for your co-workers

• Give someone a compliment

Have a blast!

via nypl

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

—Henry Beston