Louis Roney: Myself - my neighbor

One of the most rewarding of all human relationships is that involving “good neighbors.” My b.w. and I are fortunate indeed in having a close neighbor, who is both smart and helpful and a good friend, time-tested through thick and thin. Our neighbor V is exactly the age where he could be my son, and if I had a son like V, that would suit me fine.

“We make our friends. We make our enemies, but God makes our neighbors.” — G.K. Chesterton

People somehow know what’s going on in their own neighborhood.

“Love is blind, but neighbors aren’t!” — Anonymous

New York City is a special case. A New Yorker for many years, I had lots of friends, but I didn’t know the lady who lived across the hall from me in my apartment house. Similar interests draw people together in New York, no matter their street address.

The relationship between neighbors has generated many philosophical comments throughout human history.

“Tact” is the requisite ingredient when one’s neighbors are not naturally amicable.

“A good neighbor is a fellow who smiles at you over the back fence, but doesn't climb over it.” — Anonymous

We are asked to love our neighbors as ourselves — but there is no specification as to what kind of guy the neighbor may be. One thing is sure: None of us are “neighbors” until we get to know each other. In Eliot House dining room at Harvard, I sometimes dined at a table with great poet Robert Frost, who wrote in his poem “Mending Wall” that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Friendship, of course, tears down the fences.

“The fence that makes good neighbors needs a gate to make good friends” — Anonymous

Definition of neighbor by curmudgeon writer Ambrose Bierce: “One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.”

The “good neighbor policy” has long been a U.S. international political slogan: “In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others — the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects all.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Writer Henry Miller, in a coterie of American expatriate Parisian artists, wrote: “Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.”

“The only people who listen to both sides of your arguments are your neighbors!” — Anonymous

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.” — Mark Twain

“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.” — Abraham Lincoln

“If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson