Archives - June 2004

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

My mother's menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it.

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

I told my wife that a husband is like a fine wine; he gets better with age. The next day, she locked me in the cellar.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

I like nonsense -- it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope...and that enables you to laugh at all of life's realities.

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.

A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.

Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality.

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.