On the Learning Curve

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

 “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”  - Bill Nye

True forgiveness is when you can say, “Thank you for that experience.” - Oprah Winfrey

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.” – Franklin P. Jones

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams

 “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.” – Joe Abercrombie

Confidence



"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt

“Confidence comes from not always being right but form not fearing to be wrong.” – Peter T. McIntyre

"Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment." - Thomas Carlyle

"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." - Malcolm Muggeridge
"Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down." - Ray Bradbury

"Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem." - Woody Allen

"Self-confidence is the result of a successfully survived risk." - Jack Gibb

"Cowards die many times before their deaths." - William Shakespeare



Speak … or, Hold Your Peace

“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one’s mouth and remove all doubts.” – Mark Twain

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemmingway

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.” – H. G. Wells

 “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart you can’t utter.” – James Earl Jones

“Keep your mouth shut and your mind open.” - Unknown

“Unless your heart, your soul, and your whole being are behind every decision you make, the words from your mouth will be empty, and each action will be meaningless. Truth and confidence are the roots of happiness.” - Unknown

Fathers

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

“I love my father as the stars – he’s a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart.” – Terry Guillemets

“The greatest gift I ever had

Came from God – I call him Dad!” – Author Unknown

“A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.” – Author Unkown

“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” – Clarence Budington Kelland

“When I was a kid, I said to my father one afternoon, ‘Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?’ He answered, ‘If the zoo wants you, let them come and get you.’” – Jerry Lewis

“A man’s children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season.” – Unknown

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.” – Charles Wadsworth

Mothers

“When you are a mother you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” - Sophia Loren

 “A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” - Tenneva Jordan

“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.” - Osho

“God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.” - Jewish Proverb

“A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.” - Irish Proverb

“Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.” - Oprah Winfrey 

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.” - Barbara Kingslover

“On Mother’s Day I’ve written a poem for you. In the interest of poetic economy and truth, I have succeeded in concentrating my deepest feelings and beliefs into two perfectly crafted lines: You’re my mother, I would have no other!” - Forest Houtenschil

No Laughing Matter

“The Universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”

-          Carl Sagan

“Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.”

-          John Clapham

“A virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot.”

-          Anonymous

“Opie, you haven’t finished your milk. We can’t put it back in the cow, you know.”

-          Aunt Bee Taylor, “The Andy Griffith Show”

“Civilization…wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.”

-          Richard Bach

“Every day is Earth Day.”

-          Author Unknown

“There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.”

-          Mohandas K. Gandhi

“Modern technology

Owes ecology

An aplogy.”

-          Alan M. Eddison

Wonders and Mysteries

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Philosophy”

-         -  Shakespeare

“The final mystery is oneself.”

-        -  Oscar Wilde

“Uncertainty and mystery are the energies of life. Don’t let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.”

-          - R.I. Fitzhenry

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

-          - Albert Einstein

“Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.”

-          - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As soon as Man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.”

-          - Albert Schweitzer

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”

-          - Neil Armstrong

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes – The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

-          - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Good, Bad, Time

“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”

-           Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it.”

-          Plutarch

“A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.”

-          Louis L’Amour

“Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.”

-          Mason Cooley

“Certainly there are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.”

-          Jules Reynard

“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.”

-          Maria Edgeworth

“Both political parties have their good times and bad times, only they have them at different times.”

-          Will Rogers

“Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.”

-          Douglas Adams

Together

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”

-          John Lennon

"If you want to walk fast, walk alone.

If you want to walk far, walk together."

-          African proverb

“He that does good to another does good also to himself.”

-          Lucius Seneca

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

-          Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”

-          Napoleon Hill

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

-          Charles Darwin

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

-          Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.”

- Virginia Burden
 

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. They way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”

-         Margaret Young

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-         Zora Neale Hurston

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”

-         Helen Keller

“Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you…If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it.”

-         Emmet Fox

“My business is not to remake myself,

But make the absolute best of what God made.”

-         Robert Browning

“Anybody can observe the Sabbath but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.”

-         Alice Walker

“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

- Ursula K. LeGuin

Amen To That

“There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.” 

-         Robert Frost

“Chemicals, n:  Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.” 

- Author Unknown

 

“He that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.” 

- English Proverb

“My soul is dark with stormy riot,
Directly traceable to diet.”
- Samuel Hoffenstein

“Mosquitoes remind us that we are not as high up on the food chain as we think.”

- Tom Wilson

“If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end, not produce food either.”

- Joseph Wood Krutch, Naturalist

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist

“Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent.”

- Epitectus

Friend & Foe

“Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.”  
-  Sigmund Freud

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”

- Walter Winchell

“We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.”
- Aesop

“Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

- Albert Camus

“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
- Antisthenes

“The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.”

- Abraham Lincoln

“Though all things do to harm him what they can,
  No greater en'my to himself than man.”
- William Alexander, Earl of Stirling

“Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.”

- Anonymous

God's Gifts

“When I asked God for Strength,

he gave me difficult situations to face.

When I asked God for Brain and Brawn,

he gave me puzzles in life to solve.

When I asked God for Happiness,

he showed me some unhappy people.

When I asked God for Wealth,

he showed me how to work hard.

When I asked God for Favors,

he showed me opportunities to work hard.

When I asked God for Peace,

he showed me how to help others.

God gave me nothing I wanted,

He gave me everything I needed.”

- Swami Vivekananda

Humor

When humor goes, there goes civilization.
- Erma Bombeck

“There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.”
- Bill Cosby

“A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.”
- Henry Ward Beecher

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
- E.B. White

“Humor is reason gone mad.”
- Groucho Marx

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
- William James

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi

A Touch of Nature

“One Touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
- William Shakespeare

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

“Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.”
- Thomas Edison

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
- Rachel Carson

“When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.”
- Mother Teresa

“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.”
- Barbara Ward

May Post

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
-Helen Keller

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
- Nelson Mandela

“We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience; rather we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
- Howard Thurman

”The cultured give happiness wherever they go. The uncultured whenever they go.”
- Swami Chinmayananda

“The full use of your powers along lines of excellence.”
- definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere; while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... the truly wise person is colorblind.”
- Albert Schweitzer

April 2010

“It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” – Albert Einstein

“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” – Abraham Lincoln

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” – Mother Teresa

“Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
- Mark Twain

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.” – the Dalai Lama