The purest form of love is just caring—paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention. This is how we offer up the simplest of blessings to the world around us and to the lives of others. “Attention,” wrote the French thinker Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Give your sentences that courtesy and they will repay you.
