Archives - December 2009

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

In charity there is no excess.

Self–confidence is the first requisite to great
undertakings.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of
one's chosen form.

Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that
don't.

You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And
you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed
by another.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in
tilling a field as in writing a poem.

We're put on earth a little while to learn to bear the beams of
love.

Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old
sit under the shade of it.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the
same good things for the first time.

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before
the law.

Just as Hanukkah candles are lighted one by one from a single
flame, so the tale of the miracle is passed from one man to
another, from one house to another, and to the whole House of
Israel throughout the generations.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.
Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by
forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will
bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal
is reached. The key is action.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while
he gets to know something.

Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would
like it to keep in touch.

You create your opportunities by asking for them.

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do
––– or because you can now and then permit
yourself the luxury of thinking so.

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is
strengthened by doing it.

You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough
enough to follow through.

Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a
happy family all wrapped up in each other.

We have religious holidays and we have secular holidays. I see
Kwanzaa as an opportunity for African–Americans to reaffirm
ourselves if we choose to, a chance to rebuild and renew our focus.
I see Kwanzaa as a holiday of the spirit.

Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none
left for themselves.

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the
urge to throw a snowball.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A
pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.