Archives - December 2008

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Character --- the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life --- is the source from which self-respect springs.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by its restrictions. Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.

Never refuse any advance of friendship, for if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself.

Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.

Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine, a working machine...

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.

Every day holds the possibility of a miracle.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store? What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!"

I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true.

It isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

I think people don't place a high enough value on how much they are nurtured by doing whatever it is that totally absorbs them.

Everything comes to him who waits but a loaned book.

You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.