Archives - May 2004

I envy people who drink --- at least they know what to blame everything on.

I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren't certain we knew better.

No one wants advice -- only corroboration.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Look at life through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror.

Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all across the country know about it.

Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Do not let yourselves be discouraged or embittered by the smallness of the success you are likely to achieve in trying to make life better. You certainly would not be able, in a single generation, to create an earthly paradise. Who could expect that? But, if you make life ever so little better, you will have done splendidly, and your lives will have been worthwhile.

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life --- music and cats.

The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.

The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

Live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so.

The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

A little public scandal is good once in a while. It takes the tension out of the news.

Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement.

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.

Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward.

Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people. Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit --- this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.