Archives - August 2003

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.

It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.

There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

To be nobody-but-yourself --- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else --- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

Believe nothing against another but on good authority; and never report what may hurt another, unless it be a greater hurt to some other to conceal it.

You're never too old to become younger.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.