| A BIT OF FOLKLORE says that, “A man has no business to marry a woman who can’t make him miserable. It means she can’t make him happy.” Modern psychology bears out the truth of that adage. The protective shield we put up against possible hurt also reduces our chances to be exposed to, and to enjoy, possible pleasure. In isolating ourselves ‘from pain we also isolate ourselves from joy. Thus marriage for a man is an act of affirmation and commitment—not just to a woman or to a family, but to life itself. |
| A BOOK is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore a dangerous idea without fearing it will go off in your face. It is one of the few sources left where information is served up without the silent black noise of a headline or the hullabaloo of a commercial. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy. |
| A BOY wants something very special from his father. You are always hearing it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they cannot themselves be, but I tell you it also works the other way. |
| A COSMIC philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon. |
| A DEFINITION of success 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 bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. |
| A DIGNITARY who likes to be different is Harlow Shapley, Harvard astronomer and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He can’t stand cliches. Instead of the familiar “Ladies and gentlemen,” he sometimes opens an address with : “Fellow primates” |
| A DOCTOR said to me, “I have been practising medicine for 30 years, and I have prescribed many things. But in the long run I have learnt that for most of what ails the human creature the best medicine is love.”“What if it doesn’t work?” I asked.“Double the dose,” he replied. |
| A FAMOUS educator has said that he does not care what his students think of him now, but he is very much interested in what they will be thinking of him ten years from now. Parents—good parents—feel that way about their children. |
| A FRIEND who borrows a rupee or a Iandkerchief will punctiliously return it to you; but he will borrow book worth five times as much, nd possibly irreplaceable, with no thought that he holds any of your property. He will lose the book, deface it, give it away, or take it from your house without notice, honestly unconcerned whether it is his or yours. Indeed, if he cared, he might find on the flyleaf the name of a third parry from whom you had purloined it on the same terms. |
| A Generation that has looked at The polar ice from below, at Jayne Mansfield sideways and at The moon From behind is not likely to be stunned by anything. |
| A good writer refuses to be socialised and Conform.He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness.And by doing so he draws the readers eyes from its usual groove into a new way of seeing. |
| A GREAT man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. The things he describes are types because they are truths. Shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether an artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that a critic should be allegorical.Introduction to ‘Great Expectations.’ |
| A JAPANESE Emperor once asked a famous artist at his court to paint a four-panel screen of crows in flight. After much thought, the artist finally drew a single crow disappearing off the edge of the fourth panel of the screen. It was a masterpiece of movement. A great Oriental principle of drawing was fulfilled . “The idea must be present even where the brush has not passed: ~ |
| A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business. |
| A Man may love a woman even though he hates her cooking. But no man can love a woman’s cooking without feeling some sort of tenderness for her. |
| A MAN should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion. |
| A MAN who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty .They are both looking for alms. The rich for the alms of my envy.The poor man for the alms of my guilt. |
| A MATURE dog is excellent for conversation, as anyone understands who has ever sent the family away for a holiday and lived alone with the dog and the icebox. No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as a dog does. If you chat with him a while, gradually building up the argument and the intonation, he relishes it so that he will roll all around the floor, lie on his back kicking and groan with joyous worship. Very few wives are so affected. |
| A MEAL is not simply food but also the spirit in which it is eaten. Mealtimes should be the occasions for the happiest kinds of exchanges and learning—for cheerful, not solemn, communion. A bad meal can be redeemed by good conversation, but a good meal can be irretrievably ruined by bad conversation. |
| A NATURALIST discovered that baboons have a language consisting of shrill alarm cries, contented chucklings and grunts, dissatisfied barks, silly happy chatterings, mourning wails for their dead, cries denoting pain, groans of dread, and calls for assembly and for action. He observed that at night there was a continuous soft mumbling among them which sounded so much like human talk that he was almost convinced that they were capable of articulated speech. A native confirmed this for him: “Baboons can talk,” he said. “But they won’t do it in front of white men for fear you will put them to work.” |
| A NEWLY ELECTED member was sitting in the House of Commons smoking room when Winston_Churchill, with clouded brow, ambled in and sat down in a near-by chair. For a long time the old man brooded in silence, then suddenly gave his neighbour a sharp look. “Youngman,” he growled, “I suppose you’ve wondered sometimes what on earth it was that got me into politics?” The nervous young man answered shyly that he would indeed like to know. “Ambition, young man! Sheer, naked ambition !” He relapsed into his brooding, then growled again, “And what do you think has kept me in politics all these years? Anger! Sheer,naked anger !”With that Churchill rose and shuffled out again. |
| A Prayer : God ,give me sympathy and sense And help me keep my courage high.God,give me calm and confidence And please … a twinkle in my eye. |
| A SECRET IS hidden within every man and woman, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their inner-most selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize. —Yousuf Karsh, Faces of Our Time |
| A SHIPWRECKED sailor on this coast bids you set sail. Full many a gallant ship ere we were lost weathered the gale.- Two thousand years ago this epitaph was inscribed on the tombstone of a Greek sailor whose body had been washed ashore on the coast of Asia Minor. The quotation has haunted me ever since I first came across it. It seems to me it has a peculiar and poignant meaning for our time. We are accustoming ourselves too much to the language of defeat and disillusion. We read and we repeat that the survival of civilization itself is threatened. But to live has always been a risk, and every enterprise a gamble and an act of faith. The epitaph of the shipwrecked sailor reminds us that, in spite of the many dangers, ships do arrive, sailors do accomplish their course. The very faith in the possibility of victory over ruin and corruption may help us to win victory. The very faith that a peaceful and just world is possible may help to bring it about. |
| A SPEAKER recently told a group of businessmen that he would never promote to top level a man who was not making mistakes—and big ones at that. Obviously, he did not have habitual bunglers in mind. But he did admit that business does not look for the man with no faults. It wants the man who makes creative mistakes. |
| A striking example of the intellectual’s preoccupation with the things of the mind concerns the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. After considerable internal debate, he decided to get married. When, however, he called at the young lady’s house, he found to his intense disappointment that she had left town—20 years before. |
| A Study shows that stress does not cause high blood pressure. It was conducted with rats, though, so that may not mean much—they’re not in the People race. |
| A SUFI CHANT : Sing a song of Glory, and you will be that Glory.Nothing , are you , but a song ; And as you sing, You are.You thought you were the teacher. And you find you are the one who is taught.You thought you were the seeker,And you find you are the one who is sought.Sing a song of Glory, and you will be that Glory.Nothing , are you , but a song; And as you sing, You are. |
| A TOAST given at a private dinner party by Ray Lyman Wilbur, : Let us fill a cup and drink wit love to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives—The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-coloured; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains, for they were sharp; to his time, for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become on of us. |
| A TRUE cessation of problems would be the beginning of death for a society or individual. We aren’t constructed to live in that kind of world. We are problem-solvers by nature, so much so that when problems of the real world aren’t pressing in upon us, we invent artificial ones such as how to reduce our golf score. |
| A VISITOR in the home of Danish physicist Niels Bohr noticed a horseshoe on the wall. “Can it be,” he asked, “that you, a man of science, believe this will bring you luck?” “Of course not,” said Bohr. “But I understand it brings you luck whether you believe or not.” |
| A Well ordered Life is like climbing a tower; the view half-way up is better than the view from the base, and It steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands. |
| A WISE MAN of Athens was asked when injustice would -be abolished.When those who are not wronged feel as indignant as those who are, he said. |
| A WOMAN can forgive a man for doing the wrong thing more easily than she can forgive him for attempting the right thing at the wrong time; for her sense of justice is less rigid than a man’s, but her sense of appropriateness and timing is much more highly developed. |
| A WORD is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. |
| A YOUTH is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting and attend to those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they will be carried out depends on him. He will assume affection or even devotion; it is simply the way life is. |
| ABRAHAM LINCOLN : on how to be a good lawyer: Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbour to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. |
| ABRAHAM LINCOLN : When I’m getting ready to reason with a Man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say—and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say. |
| ACCEPTANCE : Some people confuse acceptance with apathy , but there is all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped;Acceptance makes that distinction .Apathy paralyses the will to action; Acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens. |
| ADAM was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent—then he would have eaten the serpent. |
| AFFECTION , indulgence and humour alike are powerless against the instinct of children to rebel. It is as essential to their minds and wills as exercise to their bodies. If they have no reasons for it they will invent them. It is hard to imagine families limp enough to be always at peace. Wherever there is character there will be conflict. The best that parents and children can hope for is that the wounds of their conflict may not be too deep or too lasting. |
| AFTER 17 months in office, President Harry Truman wrote to his daughter: To be a good President I fear a man can’t be his own mentor. He can’t live the Sermon on the Mount. He must be a Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Caesar, Borgia, Napoleon’s chief minister, whose name has escaped me (above this he later wrote Talleyrand), a liar, double-crosser and an unctuous reli-gio (Richelieu), a hero and a what-not to he successful. So I probably won’t be, thanks be to God. But I’m having a lot of fun trying the opposite approach. Maybe it will win. |
| AFTER ALL ALLOWANCES are made for the necessity of having a few super-men in our midst—explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history—the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind, and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished. —Lin Yutang in The Importanice of Living |
| AFTER ONE golf-tournament victory, Roberto De Vicenzo, last year’s British Open champion, was approached by a woman with a tragic story about her daughter. It seemed the daughter had leukaemia, and the mother was asking for money. De Vicenzo gave it to her. Later, a friend came up to him angrily and said, “Roberto, what did you do that for? Her Daughter hasn’t got leukaemia!” Roberto answered, “My friend, that is the best news I ever heard in my life!” |
| ALBERT EINSTEIN was interested in almost everything, and gave every topic and visitor his undivided attention. But sometimes he would rise abruptly– even in the middle of a sentence and say apologetically, “I have to work now.” Whereupon he would retire to his study, leaving his wife and secretary to entertain the guest.’There was nothing oflensive about this; it was obvious that Einstein’s brain had started to spin, and that he “had to work.” It seemed as though he had received orders from elsewhere, and he followed them good naturedly, ‘ expecting good natured understanding from those around him. |
| ALBERT EINSTELN was at a scientific meeting when a noted astronomer said, “To an astronomer, man is nothing more than an insignificant dot in an infinite universe.” “I have often felt that,” Einstein replied. “But then I realize that the insignificant dot who is man is also the astronomer.” |
| ALBERT JAY NOCK : “Natural Law” accounts for nothing, for natural law means not a thing in the world but the registration of mankind’s experience. Not long ago I read a fine exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, state the problem they present and perhaps carry it a step or two backward, but as for the final “reason of the thing,” the best he could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to. |
| ALBERT SCHWElTZER had been my Sunday schooal teacher in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorrain, and so, when he came to America in 1949, my own husband and I and a few close friends arranged us have a brief meeting with him in the Cleveland railway station. We took him to a restaurant for breakfast, but I had bakedan Alsatian coffe cake to give the table a festive look. When the time came to cut the cake, I handed Dr. Schweitzer the knife. He rose, poised the blade and counted the people around the table. There were nine of us, but Dr. Schweitzer cut ten pieces. ”One piece for the young lady who so graciousle served he explained,…handing the extra slice to the waitress |
| ALBION ROSS in Journey of an American: My life in the Middle East had been taken up with news, a thing that falls into patterns concerned with governments, crises, projects, change. I had barely noticed that what was not changing was so great a part of everything. News is a very special distortion. It is either about something changing or something unusual. Life, however, is to a large extent about something not changing and not being unusual. Follow the news diligently enough, and you will become blind to the greater part of reality and to most of the values of living. |
| ALDOUS HUXLEY in Heaven and Hell: I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously I looked at a film of sand I had picked up, on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow. Than, suddenly, I saw how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital, beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us. |
| ALDOUS HUXLEY in his foreword to Brave New World: Chronic remorse is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can, and address yourself to the task of behaving better the next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the mud is not the best way of getting clean. |
| ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, on receiving his Nobel Prize, wrote : Woe betide the nation whose literature is interrupted by force. This is not merely a violation of freedom of the Press, it is the incarceration of the nation’s heart, the amputation of the nation’s memory. |
| ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE in notes on an American tour made in 1831-32: Why, as civilization spreads, do out-standing men become fewer? Why, when attainments are the lot of all, do great intellectual talents become rarer? Why, when there are no longer lower classes, are there no more upper classes? Why, when knowledge of how to rule reaches the masses, is there a lack of great abilities in the direction of society? America clearly poses these questions. But who can answer them? |
| ALFRED LUNT and Lynn Fontanne, the veteran American acting couple, agree that their most memorable theatrical experience was in London, during the Second World War. The play was Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night. During one of Lynn’s scenes, there was a real bomb alert and the curtain was lowered. Alfred, back-stage, roared, “Take it up again!”As Lynn continued, the buzz bombs were heard, one of them quite near the theatre, exploding just moments before Alfred entered, speaking his first line: “Are you all right, darling?” The audience cheered. By the time the Lunts were into the scene where the play’s theme of resistance to aggression was stated, the bombs were doing the sound man’s work, right on cue. “Listen,” said Alfred, reciting a line precisely as written, “that awful sound you hear is the death rattle of civilization.” The audience began to weep.“The play was a catharsis,” Lynn explains. “The English would never allow themselves to cry over their personal or national misfortunes. However, it was permissible to become so involved in a play that you wept for the characters, and, through them, for all decency and humanity.” |
| ALL COMPETENT men should have some ambition, for ambition is like the temper in steel. If there’s too much the product is brittle, if there’s too little the steel is soft; and without a certain amount of hardness a man cannot achieve what he sets out to do. |
| ALL CORRESPONDENCE is coming rapidly to a stop. The excitement of the discovery of some remote place, which friends used to share with one by letter has ceased. Now one receives a post card, usually so scribbled that it is difficult to work out from whom it comes. People rarely write love letters any more. They telephone instead—and by doing so are no longer blessed with those welcome hours of learning to examine and evaluate their feelings. Two-thirds. of our knowledge of the past has come down to us through letters. Of our era, all that will remain will be the reporting in the Press, radio and television, filed away on tape. Archives of families will be empty except for bills and bank statements. |
| ALL GOOD BOOKS are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it. All belongs to you : the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. — Ernest Hemingway |
| All MY LIFE a ludicrous and portentous solemnization of sex has been going on. Our advertisements, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in terms of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety. And the psychologists have so bedevilled us with the infinite importance of complete sexual adjustment and the all but impossibility of achieving it, that I could believe some young couples go to bed with the complete works of Freud and Krafft-Ebing on the bed table. We have reached the stage at which nothing is more needed than a roar of old-fashioned laughter. —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Bles, London) |
| ALMOST everybody cuddles babies. Few people willingly touch the old, I bet they need it so desperately. Long after sight, hearing, speech, mental falculties are lost or impaired, the sense of touch remains. When our family doctor visited my mother in her last illness, she was showing no sign of consciousness. He lifted her limp hand, placed it on his own. Gently he called her name. If you know me,” he said, “just press ny hand.” Awed, I saw her fingers flutter as she obeyed. If touching is so important, why don’t we more often touch the old and lonely? Let’s face it: old eyes are watery, old hands thin and clawlike, vrinkled skin unappealing. But, “I’m lonely; just hold my hand,” the old woman in my mother’s nursing home said to me. Perhaps for all of us she voiced our deepest need; the gentle touch. |
| ALTHOUGH it is more blessed to give than to receive, givers who cannot take in return miss one of the finest graces in life, the grace of receiving. To receive gratefully from others is to enhance others sense of their Worth. It puts them on a give-and-take level, the only level on which real fellowship can be sustained. It changes one of the ugliest things in the World, patronage, into one of the richest things in the world, friendship.—’Halford Luccock in Living Without Gloves |
| AMERICA was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered, it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next 50 years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy |
| AMERICAN ACTRESS Mary Pickford, on human error: If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down. |
| AMERICAN AUTHOR Jim Bishop: Education is the carpentry of the mind. It is an edifice of information and logic. An educator once said, “Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few storeys are out of line, no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 storeys high, everyone will see that it tilts.” |
| AMERICAN author Carson Kanin recalls a lunch with Somerset Maugham, then 80, and others. The conversation got round to obituaries. Considering it a tactless subject to discuss before the ageing novelist, Kanin finally managed to signal to the others. Then there was a long pause and the table was sorry about for a few seconds when Maugham chirped up, “I’ve read my obituary I” “Have you?” someone commented. “That’s most unusual.” “The editor sent it to me,” explained Maugham. “He asked if I’d be good enough to check it for accuracy. When he called the following day, I said to him, ‘Well, I find it accurate enough, but not half warm enough.’ So he invited me to tidge it up. And I did. I can assure you it’s warm enough now!” |
| AMERICAN baseball star, Branch Rickey : The most important single qualification a man should have to marry one of my daughters is infinite kindness. Infinite kindness will sustain a marriage through all its problems, its uncertainties, its illnesses, its disappointments, its stories, its tensions, its fears, its separations, its sorrows. Out of infinite kindness grow real love and understanding and tolerance and warmth. Nothing can take the place of such an enduring asset. |
| AMERICAN journalist Meg Greenfield, illustrating the power of temptation: In his book on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell described how, across the bleak valleys, from trench to trench, the opposing sides would call out loud political harangues at each other. But the most demoralizing caller, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans, simply told the fascists how much better his own side was fed than they were. “Buttered toast !” — you could hear his voice echoing ross the lonely valley —”We’re just sitting down to buttered toast over here ! Lovely slices of buttered toast !” It was a lie, of course, exploiting an ancient truth: the universal vulnernability of all kinds of high-minded political and philosophical postures to simple tug and temptation of the senses. |
| AMERICAN Poet Robert Frost : All men are born free and equal — free at least in their right to be different. Some people want to homogenize society everywhere. I’m against the homogenizers in art, in politics, in every walk of life. I want the cream to rise. |
| AMERICAN WRITER Margaret Sangster, on losing your temper: It’s like a sharp nail that tears the threads of something durable and lovely. We may use every bit of our patience and skill in mending it, but we cannot make it like new again. The darned place will always be conspicuous. |
| AMERICAN writer Anita Loos used to go horseback riding at San Simeon, on the huge estate belonging to William Randolph Hearst. She writes: On the shore far below the horseback trail, one could see a long complex of warehouses built to contain art objects for which W.R. couldn’t find space until he got around to enlarging his castle. But that fact didn’t stop him from buying, mostly by mail. W.R. instructed Alice Head, his English representative, to track down and buy some Irish silver he had seen pictured in an out of-date art magazine. lt took her a long time to trace the silver which had mysteriously disappeared. There wasn’t connoisseur in the art world who knew what had happened to it. Finally, Alice put a detective on the job, and when his report came in it read: “This item was purchased six years ago by W.R. Hearst in California.” The silver had been in packing cases ever since, hidden among the loot in a Hearst warehouse.— |
| AMERICANS are unfit for human consumption. Animals which have seven parts for every million of DDT in their fatty tissues are judged in the United States to be unfit to eat. And it is now disclosed that the average American has 12 parts per million of the pesticide in his body. |
| AN ADOLESCENT in his round of joyless promiscuity is no more a revolutionary than a pickpocket is a socialist.He is merely taking adult prerogatives without taking adult responsibility. Taking without earning. |
| AN ARTIST can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly, as she is and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be. More than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than 18 in her heart, no matter what the merciless hours have done. -R. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land |
| AN ATOM is built like our solar system. It is almost all empty space. The nucleus is the only solid piece. Scientists say that if you eliminated all the space in every atom in the body of a 14-stone man he would be no bigger than a particle of dust. The earth without the space in its atoms would be a ball only half a mile in diameter |
| AN EDITORIAL in Medical Tribune clears up a common misapprehension about the meaning of the saying, “It is the exception that proves the rule”: The saying is very old, and one of the oldest meanings of the word “proves” is tests. In the King James version of the New Testament we read, “Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good.” Thus the exception does not confirm the rule..: It tests it, shows there is something wrong with it, and indicates that it must be modified or changed. |
| ANDRE MAURIOS : It is when we attempt to reveal and explain ourselves to others that we realize our ignorance on the subject, and find that we must build our house, room by room, while we take visitors through it. |
| ANDRE MAURIOS : We learn rather late in life to admit that we do not know that which we do not know, that we have not read those books we have not read. But once we have made up our mind as to this, what a relief it is ! |
| ANDRE MAURIOS in To the Fair Unknown: Such terrible tragedies have grown from incidents so inconsiderable and from coincidences so surprising that we in our innocence wonder at the haphazardness of Fate. Lord Dunsany has written a curious play on this theme. In the first act we see a man miss his train. The gates close just as he reaches the platform. This seems to be the reason for his failure in life, and he is always saying, “Just think, if I had only been one second earlier.” Then one clay an Eastern pedlar offers him a magic crystal which allows its owner to transform at his pleasure one of the events in his past. Of course the hero chooses to arrive on the platorm one second earlier. This time he catches the train and his life begins anew. But in different circumstances it is just as much a failure as the first , for the reasons for that failure lay not in outside events but his own character. |
| ANDRE PREVIN, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, recently lost a set of unsigned credit cards. A few days later, a young man of artistic appearance presented himself in a London jewellers with a card signed “Andre Previn” and tried to buy a watch. Something in his manner aroused the assistant’s suspicions, and he phoned the police. There was not much the police officer could do; the signature on the card tallied exactly with that of the carrier. But the pretender’s nerve cracked when the policeman gently enquired if “that Vaughan Williams symphony you mentioned on television last week was written before or after the First World War?”The cards were returned to a delighted Previn -The Guardian, London |
| ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, on the force of love, in Locked Rooms and Open Doors: People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a tot of people give love like that—just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden. I don’t think it is anything you can give. Love is a force in you that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and power and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it. |
| ANONYMOUS COMMUNICANT , the reason for praying: To me; saying prayers is sort of like flinging up skyhooks. If I get a few of them fastened in up there, then I’ll have something to swing on if someone jerks the world out from Under me |
| ANONYMOUS WRITER, about a tourist’s visit to the nineteenth-century Polish rabbi, Hofetz Chaim: Astonished to see that the rabbi’s home was only a simple room filled with books, plus a table and a bench, the tourist asked, “Rabbi, where is your furniture?”“Where is yours?” replied the rabbi.“Mine?” asked the puzzled tourist. “But I’rn a visitor here. I’m only passing through.”“So am I,” said Hofetz Chaim.— |
| ANTI SMOKING warnings are nothing new. These words appeared in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal in 1847: “Smoking produces gastric disorders, coughs, and inflammatory affections of the larynx and pharynx; diseases of the heart, and lowness of the spirits and in short, is very injurious to the respiratory, circulating, alimentary and nervous systems.” |
| ANXIETIES about sleep are self-defeating. Physiologically, our emotions directly interfere with sleep—for example, by increasing blood pressure and muscular tension and by bringing into play the stimulating chemicals released through the action of the nervous system. These physical changes further trigger anxieties, and we are caught, wide awake, in a vicious circle. Perhaps our parents knew better than we how to approach the unknown land of sleep. In their periods of quiet reading before bedtime, they introduced a smooth interlude between the whirl of the day’s activities and the withdrawal to sleep. And in their bed-time prayers, they made explicit their resignation to rest and their submission to unconsciousness. “In Your hands I entrust my spirit,” says the Orthodox Jew before sleep; and throughout the world, religious people have devoted the last minutes of the day to prayer and meditation. With the burdens of the day shouldered to the best of their abilities, presidents, statesmen and kings have placed their souls in trust and accepted oblivion. |
| ANY VENTURE in life towards a high goal, has a “flying trapeze” quality about it, and one of the most stupendous such leaps is marriage. The partners stretch out their hands in the faith that the other will be there to grasp them. And they fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Of course, it is a venture. Lloyd’s of London will insure anything in the heavens above (aircraft) or on the earth beneath (cars) or in the waters under the earth (submarines). They will even insure good weather on Christmas Day 1960, it you will pay the premium. But not even Lloyd’s will insure the success of a marriage. It takes the man and the wife and God to do that. But it is a great spring through the air, and the glorious uncertainty adds to the zest. |
| ANYONE WHO wants to get to the top has to have the guts to be hated. That applies to politicians, writers, anybody who gets into a certain position. Because that’s how you get there. You don’t get there by everybody loving you. Everybody in the world wants to be liked by everybody else. That’s human nature. But you have to learn to take it. |
| ARCHIBALD RUTLEDGE in Santee Paradise: In nature we do not discover despondency, the handmaid of despair; we never had self-pity, which undermines virtue more subtly than arrant vice. Wild things do not resign or surrender; they will fight to the death. Even a butterfly will defend itself. All living things love life, and if we do not love it enough to make it seem worth while to ourselves and to others, a suspicion arises that there must be something the matter with us. Take self-pity out of life and you would be making great progress in the redemption of humanity. This is really a disease and, I take it, a disease incident to civilization, for as we go back toward nature we find less of it and in nature’s home none at all. Her children are valiant; whatever may be their adversities, they do not complain; they are self-reliant, and they never lose hope. |
| ARTHUR BENSON in Along the Road: There are many people who practically never write to old friends, because they have a feeling that if they write at all they must write at length . But that is a great mistake;and by this reticence many a good relationship is broken.The point is the letter , not the length or literary quality of the letter . And it is pitiful think that a few words scribbled on a scrap of paper three or four times in a year might save a good friendship from perishing listlessly from lack of nourishment |
| ARTHUR GODFREY : My credo? I’d say it’s “live life to the fullest.” That’s something most of us don’t do until we’ve been on the brink of death. I have. I feel as if I’m living on borrowed time, and some-times that makes me do silly things. I can look at a bouquet of flowers, for instance, and become all choked up. I be-come grateful to God for the privilege of being alive to enjoy it: if you look at a bird, a tree, the miracle of birth, how can you deny the existence of God? Everywhere you turn you sec this ever-lasting life. Every year in winter, I look out at the bare woodland, and then in spring I see it all bloom into the most Ica tiful mass of greenery ever conceive., Everlasting life? Of course there is! |
| AS A BEGINNER Amelia Earhart participated eagerly in the life around airports. Of her first leather flying coat, she recalled: “It was 1922. Somehow I’d contrived to save 320. With it I bought–at a very special sale—an elegant leather coat. Patent leather! Shiny and lovely. But suddenly I saw that it looked Ad new. How were people to know that I was a flier if I was wearing a flying coat that was brand-new? Wrinkles! That was it. There just had to be wrinkles. “So– I slept in it for three nights.” |
| AS A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, home at times meant scarcely more to me than a comfortable chair in a small hotel room. But, in the relative sense of the moment, it was home, and a welcome base to which to return.Nothing brings as quickly to mind the horror of natural upheaval, civil strife or war as the picture of the”homeless.” The terrible deprivation of the security of home is the worst of mass tragedies.— |
| AS ANYONE setting out on a walk or bike ride knows, it’s hard to empty your mind of worry and planning, analyzing and hurting, and that deadly armada of “What-ifs”. Your agitation seems to travel with you, and soon you conduct small theaters of the mind, in which you play various roles and rehearse dreaded or hoped for conversations. |
| AS FLOWERS carry dewdrops ,trembling on the edges of the petals, and ready to fall at the first waft of the wind or brush of bird, so the heart should carry its beaded words of thanksgiving. At the first breath of heavenly flavor, let down the shower, perfumed ,with the hearts gratitude. |
| AS PRIME MINISTER Winston Churchill had his own unique methods for bringing a gathering to a close. In his memoirs, Lord’Boyd-Carpenter, Financial Secretary in the Churchill government of 1951-1955, describes one such incident: The meeting of the Defense Committee included a number of Senior Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff, but as can happen With such august gatherings, it made very little progress. The Prime Minister became bored with it. Any other Prime Minister would have suggested adjournment to an unspecified date, but Churchill preferred to break it up in his own Way. He suddenly interrupted, pointing a finger at the Window, and said in a loud voice, “What is that bird P” Ministers, Generals and others started giving quick identification. “I think it was a jay, Prime Minister.” “A big seagull, Prime Minister,” said another. In the confusion Churchill got up from his chair and began to leave the room. On his Way he passed me and somewhat daringly I said, “I didn’t see the bird, Prime Minister.”“There Wasn’t one,” he said with an immensely pleased grin and stomped happily out of the room. |
| AS SOON as I was thoroughly wet through on the way home, I became one with the weather and would nor have changed the day. It is only while one is dry that one is out of sympathy with rain; when one is wet through, one minds it no more than the trees do, having become part of the day itself. — |
| AS THE COLLEGE-AGE daughter of a friend of mine was being seated on a plane a few years ago, she glanced quickly at the occupant of the adjoining seat. Reacting with a mixture of excitement and self-conscious dismay, she wondered whether the nattily attired man could really be Bing Crosby. Try as she might, she could not get up the courage to look squarely at him, but strove with sideway peeks to confirm her impression. Finally, her amused seatmate bent towards her and in that famous baritone said, almost apologetically, “Well, everyone has to be somewhere . |
| ASKED TO what he ascribed Churchill’s longevity, Lord Moran, his personal physician, replied, “It’s 50 per cent nature, 50 per cent me and 50 per cent Sir Winston. I know this adds up to 150 per cent—but remember, Sir Winston is not just one person.”—Leonard Lyons |
| AT 40 SAID Sophia Loren recently -I have learn to watch my detours. ration my enthusiasms, collect fewer experiences and more satisfactions. I am less cynical than I was ten years ago. I do not move as easily from ecstasy to despair. I have less need to see everything, fill all the silences and everyone love me |
| AT A COMMEMORATION of the 90th anniversary of the birth of the poet Marianne Moore, former New York Mayor john Lindsay recited four precepts to live by that had been set down by Miss Moore: feed imagination food that invigorates. Whatever it is, do it with all your might.Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself. Say to yourself, “I will be responsible.”She once said, “Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, over-befriended, overconsulted and half-adopted, and you will have no leisure.Face that when you come to it.” |
| AT A PICASSO RETROSPECTIVE show in Paris in 1966, hundreds of canvases were arranged in chronological order, the first works being traditional landscapes and still lifes. A little further on, the landscapes took on new colours and the still lifes became less still, until, turning the corner, one came upon the bold,exuberant experiments for which the painter is known today. A friend who had seen the show exclaimed to Picasso, who was then 85, “I do not understand the grouping; the beginning pictures are so mature, so serious and solemn–then the later ones more and more different and wild. It is almost as if the dates should be reversed. How do you explain it?”“Easily,” replied Picasso, his eyes sparkling. “It takes a long -time to become young . |
| AT DINNER the other night, we were discussing certain of our affluent friends and I remarked to my husband :“Relax, someday we will also get rich”. He reached over ,took my hand , and replied :“Honey, we are rich. Someday we will also have money” |
| AT FIRST it is difficult to recognire an idea as original. Nearly any notion, whether old, banal, spurious, novel or brilliant, may pop up with a flutter of excitement. flow is one to distinguish? Notice, after three days- whether it still quivers. |
| AT THE age of 65 it occurred to me : if there were 15 months in every year, I’d be only 52. That’s the trouble with us—we number everything. Take women, for example. I think wonien deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40. |
| ATHEISTS may be pretty clever fellows, but you don’t find them doing any great organized good in the world. You never hear of an Atheists’ Hos-pital or an Atheists’ Committee for the Relief of Starving Whoosis Tribes. Atheists don’t even have choirs, out-ings or cricket teams. It seems to take some kind of faith to get people to-gether to do some good or even to have some fun |
| ATTITUDE : Get the right perspective. When Goliath came against the Israelites, the soldiers all thought, “He’s so big we can never kill him.” David looked at the same giant and thought, “He’s so big I Can’t miss.” |
| AUGUST is hardly the month when people plan great new things full of ginger and surprises. But in a curious way it is the month when we pause, consider and assess, in the light of reason. More decisions not to rush into this or that are perhaps made in August than in any other month. These decisions persist and control many actions in what have come to be considered the more aggressive months of the year. People relaxing in the shade of a hot month cover more ground than they ever realize It is a time when they pick up this or that book and gradually realize what it is all about. It is a month when, on holiday, they visit new places with old histories and quietly get a better perspective of the past, the present, yes, and the future. Watch August ! It is a more decisive month than one may have thought. |
| BADGERED” snubbed. and scolded on the one hand; petted, flattered and indulged on the other—it is astonishing how many children work their way up to an honest manhood in spite of parents and friends. —Henry Ward Beecher |
| Be grateful for yourself .Yes, for yourself . Be thankful. Understand that what a man is, is something he can be grateful for and ought to be grateful for. |
| BE QUICK to praise. People like to praise those who praise them. Be sincere in doing this. Be polite. If you are, others will be polite to you. That makes life a little easier. Be helpful. This is the first definition of success. Be cheerful. There are enough crepehangers around without adding to the list. Don’t be envious. By far the better way is to assume that what the other fellow does, you can do as well or better. |
| BECAUSE he wanted to identify with The poor of India Mahatma Gandhi disliked forms of luxury or ostentation and lived as simply as possible. Once, he was asked why he always travelled In third class in railway trains. Because there is no fourth class,” replied Gandhi. |
| BENJAMIN FRANKLIN , in his famous Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennisylvania , remarked that large cities are the habitat of enquiring minds. Many modern colleges and universities are coming. to realize this. Rather than advertising that they offer a bucolic retreat away from big-city distractions, they now trumpet the virtue of being right on the threshold of the inner cities—-where the city itself is a gigantic laboratory for the study of science, culture, sociology, literature, government, and the simple rites of achieving maturity among one’s fellow men. |
| BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ; “Being arrived at 70, and considering that by travelling farther in the same road I should probably be led to the grave, l stopped short, turned about, and Walked back again; which having done these four years, you may now call me 66.” |
| BERNARD BARUCH in Baruch: The Public Years: There is not much difference, really, between the squirrel laying up nuts and the man laying up money. Like the squirrel, the man—at least at the start—is trying to provide for his basic needs. I don’t know much about squirrels, but I think they know when they have enough nuts. In this they are superior to men, who often don’t know when they have enough, and frequently gamble away what they have in the empty hope of getting more. |
| BERNARD BERENSON, art critic : I ask myself what would 24-year-old B.B. have thought of B.B. at .94. Would he have been too shy to approach him, or would he simply not have wanted to waste time with a spoilt, vain, self-centred old man? The B.B. of 24 was at the same time too timid and too proud to make up to famous men. What use could they possibly have for him? Thus I have lost Many opportunities which I now regret. For now know with what joy old men receive the young. The young help them to open up; they stimulate them, or, more simply, they warm them with the rays of youth. |
| BERNARD SHAW ” The only person who behaves sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he ‘sees me. All the rest go on with their old measurements. |
| BERNARD SHAW may have been the first notable ever to speak up against noise pollution. In the relatively quiet early 1920s, Shaw. entering a luxurious restaurant, was approached by a waiter who said deferentially, “While you are eating, we. the orchestra will play anything you like. What would you like them to play?” “Dominoes,” said Shaw |
| BERNARD SHAW once described his behaviour during danger thus: “In moments of crisis my nerves act in the most extraordinary way. When disaster seems imminent, my whole being is simultaneously braced to avoid it. I size up the situation in a flash, set my teeth, contract my muscles, take a firm grip of myself and, without a tremor, always do the wrong thing.” |
| BERTRAND RUSSELL in Portraits from Memory: The Whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It has been thought that men cannot be happy without a “theory of life.” Actually, it is the simple things that really matter. If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will he happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife hateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the of a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night he sighs for the light of day –then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen–a different diet, perhaps, or more exercise. Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy. This, incidentally, was the opinion of Jefferson, who on this ground deplored the horse. Language would have failed him if he could have foreseen the motorcar. |
| BETTE DAVIS in the Lonely Life : Morality to me is honesty, integrity, character. Old fashioned words. There are new words now that excuse everyone. Give me the days of heroes and villains. The people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch. How wonderful it would be to know again where we stand and which side we’re on! |
| Between the parents and the Children of today, there exists a new misunderstanding; It is no longer very easy to determine which generation is educating the other. |
| BILL COVE, a sales consultant, on the difference between fate and destiny: Fate is what life gives, to you.Destiny is what yciu do with it. If you are 1,60 metres, you aren’t ever going to be 1.90. If you have trouble putting the cap on your toothpaste tube in the morning, mechanical engineering is not for you:’. That’s fate. But the way a person accepts the things he can’t change and then goes 105 per cent for the things can, that’s destiny. What most people tend to forget is that we have unbelievable control over our destiny. |
| BILL VAUGHAN, defining progress: Progress means noise. Indeed, we could pinpoint the date when modern civilization was born if we could discover when man first said, “Turn that thing down I” |
| BILLIE WILCOX , on the lessons of a disaster: While my husband Frank and l were living in Pakistan many years ago, our six-rnonth old baby died. An old Punjabi who heard of our grief came to comfort us. “‘A tragedy like this is similar to being plunged into boiling water,” he explained. “If you are an egg, your affliction will make you hard boiled and unresponsive. lt‘ you are a potato, you will emerge soft and pliable, resilient and adaptable.” lt may sound funny to God, but there have been many times when l have prayed, “O Lord, let me be a potato.” |
| BOB TALBERT, on letting yourself go A good cry can usually get rid of the thing that caused it. Even when you are crying uncontrollably, you are still controlling yourself at the core. But a good laugh is one of the few things I can think of that allow you to totally release that control of your core. |
| Bookshops are centers of civilization. They are the last stand we are all putting up” declared Dame Rebecca West, opening a new bookshop, Branden Books, in chapel place, Tunbridge Wells. ”there is a permanent wealth tax being imposed on civilization called Television ” she said. ”there you see actors acting beautifully in worthless plays and you hear political arguments that are inferior to those who you would read in any recognized book. The private reader is the buttress against the total ruin of civilization. He buys books and reads them slowly ,often and well.” |
| Boris Pasternak Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live tinder, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today’s experiences. No one knows what the formula is. nor how slight a change may reshape the pattern to our heart’s desire. Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us towards peace, productivity and human brotherhood. |
| BOYS FLYING kites haul in their white-winged birds. You can’t do that way when you’re flying words. “Careful with fire” is good advice,. we know “Careful with words,” is ten times doubly so. Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall hack dead; But God Himself can’t kill them when they’re said. |
| BRITAIN’S Chay Blyth made the first solo non-stop trip by sailboat around the world in a westerly direction in 292 days. When reporters questioned him about loneliness, the 31-year-old Blyth said, “You’d be surprised how you come to enjoy just being alone. It’s probably selfish, but the truth is, I wasn’t really lonely or unhappy being by myself.” One wonders if perhaps many peo-ple who live alone don’t make them-selves unhappy by assuming that they are supposed to be unhappy. |
| Whenever I’m disappointed with my lot in life, I stop and think about little Jamie Scott. Jamie was trying out for a part in his school play. His mother told me that he’d set his heart on being in it, though she feared he would not be chosen. On the day the parts were awarded, I went with her to collect him after school. Jamie rushed up, eyes shining with pride and excitement. Then he said those words that remain a lesson to me: “I’ve been chosen to clap and cheer.” |
| BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER Lord Snowdon writes of actress Marlene Dietrich, who gave him his first important sitting: She is a great professional. Our Session took place in the afternoon on the empty Cafe de Paris stage. I developed the pictures that night and took them round to her after her ‘performance, at about 3 a.m. She didn’t ‘look at the large print; instead, she examined all my contact prints minutely, without a magnifier. “All right,” she said. “I like the face in this one, but I like the smoke in that one.” “But, Miss Dietrich,” I protested, “these pictures have got to go to press this morning.””Then you’ve got four hours,” she said. “What you do is, you put this one in the enlarger, and you shade this part back with your hand. Okay ? Then you take the negative with the smoke I like, and print that, shading the other bit.”Technically, she was absolutely right. |
| BRITISH VETERNARIAN James Herriot is the author of the popular All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Bright and Beautiful , books about his adventures as a country vet. “I kept telling my wife for 25 years that I was going to write a book.” he says. “but she didn’t think I would Then one day she said to me, We had our silver wedding anniversary last week, and you’re 50 ; you’ll never do it now.’ So I thought, Ok, mate. I Will .Herriot began typing tentatively before the television set in the evenings- which his family preferred to previous efforts to teach him self to play the violin. And there he found his nome de plume made necessary because British veterinarian etiquette might interpret authorship as self-advertisement. James Herriot is the name of a goalkeeper on an English football team that the country vet was watching one evening as he peeked at his typewriter. |
| BRYAN MAGEE, English writer who did graduate work at Yale University : I had been in America almost a year when my sister, who had just arrived, expressed her amazement at the distribution of wealth in the United States:”Even the plumber drives up in his colossal, brand-new car.” And the word “even” at the beginning of her sentence gave me a jolt I shall never forget. “Even the plumber . . .” The words came to me across an Atlantic Ocean of separation. It was a year since I had heard anyone say something like that. If someone could write a book called “Even the Plumber” in which he really succeeded in getting Europeans to grasp how meaningless that phrase is to Americans, he would make a bigger contribution to American-European understanding than anyone has yet made. The absence of class-consciousness is the greatest cleavage in social outlook that exists between Europeans and Americans. |
| But all these things, pastiche, good clothes, vitality, love of adventure ,lively interests, must fail ,unless one waves over them the magic wand of self control and a cheerful attitude towards life. Nothing ages a woman like a worry or a bad temper. I try always to be an optimist. I refrain from discussing my troubles. A cushion which accompanies me everywhere on my travels explains my philosophy :“Never complain, Never explain” |
| BY AND with religion the living together of men was made not merely possible, but also desirable. Religion clothed and adorned the cold nakedness of primitive existence with shreds and patches of beauty. All that grace and colour which transmutes mere existence into life—in a word, all art—may truly be said to have arisen out of religion. Sculpture had its origin in idol-making, architecture in temple-building, poetry in prayer-writing, music in psalm-singing, drama in legend-telling and dancing in the seasonal worship of the gods. |
| It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshippers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. |
| CAN you keep Christmas? Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you : to ignore what the world owes you and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow men are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness —are you willing to do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas. |
| CAROL CHANNING explains how she manages to keep the freshness in her performances of Hello Dolly . ‘If I start to lose the role, I play the show to my father,” she says.“That’s something the Luntstaught me: ‘Put people you love in the audience.’ I don’t really see him out there–he died 20 years ago. It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and understands me, and will ‘not tolerate anything second-rate from rne.” -“ |
| CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN in Family Portrait: Being born homely is something that colors a woman’s life, almost from the moment of consciousness. A woman is supposed to be beautiful. To please men is her metier, her constant occupation, her living. Ily pleasing men she puts food in her mouth, a roof over her head; it is thus she earns status in her community. Nor can I see that this phenomenon has changed in 2000 years, despite the hooks on bachelor girls, on the joys of living alone or on the feminine mystique in general. Every girl who lacks beauty knows instinctively that she belongs to an underprivileged group, and that to climb up and out she will have to be cleverer, stronger, More ruthless perhaps than she would choose to be. Agnes de Mille, the dancer-choreographer, told me the condition made her fiercely ambitious. She was damned if she’d sit down under it —and she didn’t. Lack of looks, she said, was a spur, a goad that never let up. Oddly enough, wom-en who use their talents to the full be-come handsome in later life; they grow to a special beauty of their own. Per-haps fury gives them stature, makes them hold their heads high; rebellion quickens all their movements and faculties. |
| CATHERINE WRIGHT, author and the “uncritical possessor” of 16 grand-children : Today’s attitude towards children may be summed up in the words .of a contemporary : “I have never tasted the breast of a chicken. When I was young we were given the drumstick; and our parents are the breast. Now it is the children, who are given the breast, and we still have the drumstick !” – |
| CATO THE ELDER , on observing statues being set up in honour of othes remarked: “I would rather have people ask ‘Why isn’t there a statue to Cato than ‘Why is there Qne ?”’ |
| CERTAIN natives of Australia do not know how to count above three. They say, “One, two, three. Enough.” Their philosophy of economics, by putting a limit on externals, probably makes them more carefree than we who count by billions. |
| Have you ever found yourself angry when someone lied to you? Not all of your anger was indignation at his lack of veracity. You were angered at his rudeness. For his lie carried with it a belief that you were a fool. The reason we hate a liar is not his immorality, but his gall in thinking we’d believe him. |
| The man of character finds an especial attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulties that he can realize his potentialities. |
| CHARLES LAUGHTON was once asked in an interview if he would ever consider marrying again. The question was hypothetical, in as much as Laughton was happily married to Elsa Lanchester ,but he answered that he would never contemplate such a step. Pressed For a reason, he said that during courtship a rnan puts his best foot forward, and takes special care not to reveal his poorer qualities, while after marriage his real ‘self emerges day by day, and his wife has to rnake the best of it. Then he added thoughtfully, “I don’t believe I would ever put a woman through that again.” – |
| CHARLES SCHULZ, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip, wore a trendy jacket when he dined recently at the home of a friend. “You should wear a medallion with that,” said the friend, who then brought out a heavy chain from which dangled a medallion reading LOVE in beautifully entwined letters. After fingering it for a few seconds, Schulz handed it back. “lt‘s just a little too much for me,“ he said with a Charlie Brown smile. “Do you have one that says LIKE?“ |
| CHARLES STEINMETZ , the great scientist, was once asked which field for future research offered–the greatest promise. “Prayer,” he replied instantly. “Find out about Prayerl” ‘—WiIliam Parker |
| CHARLES TEMPLETON, Canadian writer,editor and broadcaster, on the uniqueness of an audience: Many years ago in Indianapolis, USA, an old preacher asked why I was so tense. “Because,” I replied,“there are 5,000 people out there expecting me to be helpful.”“No, there aren’t,” he said. “There’s only one person, Charles. No one hears you as a crowd. Everyone hears you as an individual.” |
| CHARLES VAN DOREN’S class in Humanities at New York’s Columbia University knew that a coming examination was to be centred on the analysis of certain points in the writings of Plato. The standard crib contains a readymade summary of such an analysis and this outline was dutifully committed to memory by the mass of grateful students. On the day of the exam Mr. Van Doren’s disciples filed confidently into the lecture room. Their instructor greeted them and proceeded to outline the vital question on the blackboard. Before the incredulous eyes of the 20-odd students the crib analysis began to appear, word for word. No one understood what was happening until the final and decisive command appeared in writing at the bottom. It stated simply : “Show how this is inadequate and misleading.” |
| CHARLES W GUSEWELLE: The Japanese, although riding the boom of their emergence as a postwar economic power, still pride themselves on retaining-certain traditional values. As evidence, there is the case of the government official who offered himself as hostage in place of the ng passengers and four hostesses on a jet airliner hijacked by sword-waving rad-ical students. After being delivered safely from his ordeal, the official was called before parliament to be ap-plauded for his heroism. He did not receive a lifetime pass on Japan Air Lines. He did not get title to a country estate on the lower slopes of Mount Fuji, or half-partnership in a chain of hamburger shops. He got a white porcelain vase. |
| CHARLOTTE PAUL REESE, who served six years on the U.S. Board of Parole : I believe from the bottom of my heart that there is nothing any of us might not do if certain circumstances were different. The breaking point for each of us is different. We differ from the criminals in what we’ve done, rather than in what we are. |
| CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, author and lecturer, left this note when she killed herself rather than endure the pain of cancer: Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or broken heart is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But, when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. Public opinion is changing on this subject. The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to lie in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature. Believing this choice to’ be of social service in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform to cancer. |
| CHILDREN are seldom resentful—which is a difference between them and people. They hold grudges no better than a lap dog. What happens to them happens to them, like an ill-ness; and if it is not too extravagantly unfair they forget about it. Parents learn that a child’s angry glare or floods of tears after a punishment or scolding may leave the grownup feel-ing like a despotic brute, but that half an hour later, when adult feelings are still in tatters, the child is likely as not to come flying into the room, fling both arms about the grownup’s neck and shout, “I love you I” |
| CIVILIZATION can be built around the machine, but it. is doubtful that a meaningful life can be produced by it. The risk of man’s becoming subservient to it is great. Man must be able to escape civilization if he is to survive. Man must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live. |
| CIVILIZATION is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things his-torians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even carve statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. His-torians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. —Will Durant |
| CLIFTON FADIMAN : I should like to set before you what may seem a crackpot notion : that the best place to teach philosophy is not the university but the elementary school; and that the ideal student of philosophy is the child from 8 to 12. It is he, not you ,Older , who wonders about the world : why it was made, who made it, what makes people different from animals, how we think, what it means to be brave or good or truthful, and so on. These are basically philosophical questions. I am not asking that the child be turned into a philosopher at the age of 52. All 1 suggest is that somewhere along the route his fresh, active, enquiring mind be led to wander about the .universe, the world, his place in nature, and some of the statements that wise men have made about these matters. My conviction is that we have become a people Who can do almost anything, but who are based when asked to consider the origins, meanings and consequences of our actions. This weakness in abstract thought is partly the result of our never having been confronted in our formative years with its content and its fascinations, The elementary school could do much to remedy this deficiency. |
| CLIFTON FADIMAN: A recent book contains biographies of some outstanding scientists. The author trips over himself in his eagerness to assure us that his subjects are “very approachable human beings as well as trained and often highly crea-tive people.” But do we want our scientists to waste their time in approachability? Do We really care that they have wholesome hobbies and the usual number of healthy children? Are they not worth more to us if they’re as dusty as Newton, as odd as Pascal, as remote as ‘Willard Gibbs? Shouldn’t they be left alone so that they can do their work instead of being compelled to placate us with that cosy stuff? I am not convinced that the common run of Us really prefer geniality to genius. |
| CLIFTON FADIMAN: Whatever our pleasures may be, the important thing is never to fake them, never to attend an event because it is the right thing to do or read a book because it is fashionable. “Thank heavens,” said Logan Pearsall Smith; “the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.” The discovery of what one really likes is not as easy as it sounds. It involves the discovery of oneself, a laborious and frequently painful business. In our time mass en-joyments are so effectively, so seduc-tively promoted that at times they seem to be the only kind available. All the more reason for us to keep delving into the mysterious inner world of our selves, to isolate and develop our special pleasure skills, often unsharable, often even inexplicable. |
| CONCLUDING an address to the 1902 graduating class of Hannibal High School, Mark Twain said: “I have been told I am to distribute diplomas. Now l have never distributed any diplomas before; therefore I can do it with great confidence. There is nothing that saps one’s confidence as the knowing how to do a thing. I am going to distribute these as they come, and you may toss for them afterwards.”The Hannibal Morning journal reporter covering the speech wrote:“Mr Clemens then distributed the diplomas to the class, remarking, as they began to diminish, ‘We want these to go round,’ ‘that’s a nice one, take that one,’ and so on, much to the students’ delight and amusement.” |
| CONDUCTOR Zubin Mehta ,asked to name his favourite orchestra, tactfully declined. “What would a devout Muslim answer as to which of his wives he preferred? One can have preferences about details only—a dimple here, an oboe there.” |
| CONJUGAL COURTESY Colette and I always realized that daily happiness necessitates daily vigilance. An expression she often used was “conjugal courtesy.” Those who are not afraid of noisy yawns or bellowed songs, grimaces in the mirror and sloppy bedroom slippers, will answer: “What does it matter so long as you love each other?” Colette thought on the contrary that care for one’s appearance and a certain constraint also, in the man as well as the woman, assure the durability of a couple. There was a news item which she had kept in mind. A woman in England, after 30 years of marriage, had killed her husband because of the noise he always made when drinking his soup. She was hanged; Colette swore she would have let the woman off. |
| CONSTANCE GOODALL: It is amazing how many otherwise pleasant and sensible people fall into the habit of Snaggery ! That is my private description of the odious habit of looking for the fly in the ointment, for the thoughtless or calculating comment that sets up niggling doubt about any plan. Arid, once indulged, the habit grows until it destroys the Snagger’s capacity for positive thinking and living, and to an ever-increasing degree reaches out to undermine the confidence of others. The only protection we have is to refuse to allow implied doubt to take root . When my father was 6o, and I was 13 and had just learnt to ride a bicycle, we planned to bicycle from Yorkshire to the west coast of Scotland, stopping where and when it suited us each night. Snaggery was immediately in full cry. Far too strenuous! What if it rains ‘all the time? How can you be sure of decent beds? We did it, and the memories of that “foolhardy” trip are among the richest of my life. We enjoyed our adventure so much that we continued to indulge in our long-distance bicycling every summer for the next five years. Never was Snaggery more confounded. That’s the fortunate snag in Snaggery; determination can always defeat it. |
| CONVERSATION is the oldest form of instruction of the human race. It is still an indispensable one. Great books, scientific discoveries, works of art, great perceptions of truth and beauty in, any form—all require great conver-sation to complete their meaning; with-out it they are abracadabra—colour to the blind or music to the deaf. Conversation is the handmaid of learning,true religion and free. government. It would he impossible to put too high a price on all we stand to lose by suffering its decay. |
| COUNTRY roads weren’t meant for swift passage. They were laid out originally for leisurely travel from farm to farm and from farm to village, and they conformed to the land itself, not to an engineer’s ruler laid on a map. There is a tendency nowadays to convert too many of them into minor speedways by straightening their curves and cutting every tree that a haphazard driver might run into. This tendency is to be deplored and resisted. We need the byways just as much as, possibly more than, the highways. |
| CP Ramasami Aiyar One of India’s most brilliant lawyers. declined the offer of a judgeship early in his career. Explaining his unusual refusal. he wrote to the chief justice that he preferred to –talk nonsense for a few hours each day rather than hear nonsense all day long.– |
| CREATIVENESS often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?— |
| CRITICISM may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body : it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. |
| Critics : What one approves , another scorns And thus his nature each discloses : You find the rosebush full of thorns ,I find the thorn bush full of roses. |
| Croatian born Nikola Tesla, who designed the power system at Niagara Falls, did not pretend to be anything less than the genius he was. TESLA was once recommended by a mutual friend to inventor Thomas Edison, who hired him. Tesla was’ not awed by the great Edison.On more than one occasion, he disagreed with him and proved him to be wrong. After the young knowitall had been on the job for some months, the mutual friend asked Edison, “Is Tesla as good as I said he is?”“Better,” was Edison’s grudging reply. “He’s as good as he says he is! ” |
| CS LEWIS : No man who says, “I’m as good as you,” believes it. He would not say it if he did. The Saint Bernard never says it to the toy clog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is the itching, smarting awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept. And therefore resents. |
| CYRN CONNOLLY, British author and critic, once made this suggestion: I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half a crown and 100 pounds . Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate Ind their “tips” from grateful readers it addition, in the same. way that waiters receive a wage and also what the customer leaves on the )late. Not more than 100 pounds—that would be bad for my character. A Jot less than half a crown—that would do no good to yours. |
| When I throw myself into something I always work like a demon. That’s because I’m so lazy. Lazy people always work harder than anyone else; they’re so eager to get finished and lie down again. I devise all sorts of ways to lie down often. I adore it. The man who invented the wheel could have been my consort. He was the laziest. |
| DANILO DOW, Italian writer and social worker: There are moments when things go well, and one feels encouraged: There are difficult moments and one feels overwhelmed. But it is senseless to speak of optimism or pessimism. The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among men, they will grow. That’s reality. The rest is smoke. |
| DANISH PHILOSOPHER and theology writer, Soren Kierkegaard, on the ambivalence of standing on your own two feet : The loving mother teaches her child to walk alone. She is far enough from him so that she cannot actually support him. She holds out her arms. Her face beckons like a reward, an encouragement. The child constantly strives towards a refuge in her em-brace, little suspecting that in the veiy same moment he is emphasizing his need for her, he is proving that he can do without her. |
| DAVID FOWLER, on anonymity: The real heroes of human existence are those who are camouflaged by unpretentiousness. I think a sym-phony be characterizes my feelings: a large group of musicians, each proficient in his chosen instrument, each humble enough to lend his talent so that the whole is brought to life and fully appreciated. |
| DAVID GRAYSON in Adventures in Solitude: Many times in my life I have re-peated Rodin’s saying that “slowness is beauty.” To read slowly, to think slowly, to feel slowly and deeply : what enrichment ! In the past I have been so often greedy. I have gobbled down innumerable facts, ideas, stories, poetical illusions. I have gobbled down work. I have even gobbled down my friends ! But rarely have I tasted the last flavour of anything, the final exquisite sense of personality or spirit that secretes itself in every work that merits serious attention, in every human being at all worth knowing. |
| DAVID GRAYSON in The Country-man’ s Year.: There is something abhorrent–something offensive to every instinct of comeliness, order, beauty–in this characteristic of machines : that they will not die. Their angular, rusty, immeasurably ugly skeletons mar our sunny fields, corrupt the shores Of peaceful streams, lie ghastly by pleasant roadsides. A man dies, or an animal, or a tree, and the willing earth soon takes them to itself, grows a flower where they lie, works over them patterns in moss and lichens. But the dead machine does not die : there it lies inimical to life, to beauty, to order. Man seems unable to efface the ugliness he has made. |
| DAVID GRAYSON : I wonder if you ever change human beings with arguments alone : either by peppering theirL with little sharp facts or by blowing them up with great guns of truth. You scare them, but do you change them? I wonder if you ever make any real difference in human beings without understanding them and loving them. For when you argue with a man, you are somehow trying to pull him down and make him less; but when you try to understand him, when you like him, how eager is he then to know the truth you have; and you add to him in some strange way, you make him more than he was before; and at the same time, you yourself become more. |
| DEATH is that final separation from all we have worked for, all that we have built up, all that is near and dear to us. It is too bad that dying is the last thing we do. Because it could teach us so much about living. |
| DEMOCRACY is the most fragile and difficult political system ever devised. Its fragility lies precisely in the fact that it is the system best suited to the human condition itself, since it allows the maximum freedom for all the whims and emotions, the wants and needs of the individual person. Democracy is difficult because men and women are difficult. |
| DEPLORING change is the unchangeable habit of all Englishmen. If you find any important figures who really like change, such as Bernard Shaw. Keir Hardie, Lloyd George, Selfridge or Disraeli, you will find that they are not really English at all, but Irish. Scotch, Welsh, American or Jewish. Englishmen make changes, sometimes great changes. But. secretly or openly. they always deplore them |
| DESMOND MORRIS the zoologist ,once did an experiment that exposed an ape to the “profit motive.” He first of all got it to draw and paint, and found that it was doing lovely things. Then he started rewarding the ape with peanuts for its work.“Soon it was doing any old scrawl to get the peanuts,” Morris said wryly. “I ‘had introduced commercialism into the ape’s world, and ruined him as an artist!” |
| DESTINY is what you do with it. If you are 1.60 metres; you aren’t ever going to. be 1.90. If you ‘have trouble putting the cap on your toothpaste tube in the morning, mechanical engineering is not for. you:* That’s fate. But the way a person acceptOhe ,things he can’t change and then goes 105 per cent for the things he can, that’s destiny. What most people tend to forget .is that we have unbelievable control over’our destiny. |
| Do you know how to spot a happily married man from the rest ?He is the one whose personality does not change ,when accompanied by his wife , or otherwise. |
| DONALD LAIRD: Friendliness is contagious. The trouble is, many of us wait to catch it from someone else, when we might better be giving them a chance to catch it from us. |
| DON’T trust children with edge tools. Don’t trust man, great God, with more power than he has, until he has learnt to use that little better. What a hell should we make of the world if we could do what we would ! Put a button on the foil till the young fencers have learnt not to put each other’s eyes out. |
| DR ALEXANDER BEARN , in an address to new students at the Cornell Medical College: Beware of the fellow student or faculty member who gives himself out as a person of large importance; in the words of Van Wyck Brooks, “Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in grey than in peacock bright.” It takes an immense amount of energy to keep up the appearance of greatness—rnore, indeed, than the great are prepared to give.” |
| DR HOLLIS CLOW, a psychiatrist intensely interested in psychological ageing, believes that those attitudes which keep the mind young can be wrapped up in one word: commitment. Commitment implies interest, a willingness to take risks. The firmer one’s commitment, the less likely one is to be drained or beaten by life. The occasional tendency of an unmarried woman to age faster than a married woman, Dr. Clow added, has less to do with any conditions intrinsic to marriage than with the fact that there may well have been in the single Woman”s attitudes something that kept her from committing herself to life in the first place |
| DR PERCY FRIDENBURG, retired physician, writer and philologist, who died recently at the age of 92: Nothing ages you and tires you as much as inactivity, and the avoidance of rest is one of the things that enables you to go on in old age. |
| DR. ERIC BERNE, author of the best-selling Games People Play, is hardly a conventional psychiatrist. “Life is simple,” he insists. “All you have to do about problems is make decisions. But people want certainty. You cannot make decisions with certainty. All you can do is compute likelihoods. People don’t like that.” Losers spend their lives thinking about what they’re going to do. Winners, on the other hand, are not afraid to savour the present, to “unpack their books” and “listen to the birds sing.” Losers say “but” and “if only.” Winners are enlightened people who grow rich, healthy, happy, strong, wise and brave using just three words in life: Yes, No, and Wow ! “Wow! is to express the healthy childlike wonder in all of us.” |
| DURING one of her trips to the Soviet Union, Mrs Igor Stravinsky was complimented for her proficiency in the Russian language and was asked Where she had learned it. “I was born in St Petersburg,“ she explained. “Leningrad,” she was corrected. “I Wish I were young enough to have been born in Leningrad,” she said. “But I was born in St Petersburg”. |
| DURING A VISIT to the United States, Andre Simon discussed American food: Your markets simultaneously offer endive, which is a winter vegetable, and melon, which is a summer fruit. You eat strawberries in January as well as in July. You enjoy so much variety the year ’round that your meals must end by becoming the same, month in and month out. Perhaps that is good—but I think not. Do we not look forward to the new leaves of spring, to the hot sun-shine of summer, to the bright foliage of autumn, to the briskness of winter? Isn’t it kindness to our palates, to preserve in our diets, too, this varied rhythm of the seasons? |
| EARL MOUNTBATTEN of Burma recalls when he was the last Viceroy of India .“l remember Gandhi with great affection,“ he says. Gandhi was very excited when Prince Philip got engaged lto Princess Elizabeth. He wrote me,‘l’m so delighted that your nephew is going to marry the future queen. I would like to give a wedding present.But I have nothing. What can I give them ?‘ l replietl, ‘You have nothing, but you have a stunning wheel. So get cracking and spin them something And Gandhi made them a table’cloth. I sent it to Princess Elizabeth with a note saying, ‘This you lock up with the crown jewels.’ |
| EDITH SITWELL : It is a part of the poet’s work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees. He is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment in their other lives”—a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world. Like Moses, he sees God in the burning bush when the half-opened or myopic physical eye sees only the gardener burning leaves. |
| EDITH SITWELL looks at a world designed for faith: Seeing the immense design of the world, one image of wonder mirrored by another image of wonder—the pattern of fern and of feather echoed by the frost on the windowpane, the six rays of the snowflake mirrored by the rock crystal’s six-rayed eternity—I ask myself, “Were those shapes moulded by blindness? Who, then, shall teach me doubt?” |
| EDITORIAL in The Saturday Evening Post: ” People have been growing old for as long as the human race can remern-ber—not quite as old as most of us expect to become, by the grace of God and antibiotics, but old nevertheless. But now there is a widespread feeling that “the aged” have become a class whose welfare should be the responsibility of the bureaucracy. Why has old age become so much more of a problem than it used to be? A doctor has suggested that the tendency to make old age a “problem” is a manifestation of an “underlying disease—family, cultural and social frag-mentation and breakdown.” Thus what used to be intimate family problems become matters for the marriage counsellor, the psychiatrist, the disciplinary school. Grandfather and grandmother, instead of enjoying an honoured position in the home, became a problem for “social” solution. That children, as well as the state, have some responsibility for the care of their elders is generally ignored. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that parents now live so ‘long that they can no longer expect to remain “a part of their younger relatives’ family.” The idea of a statute of limitations on family loyalty is something new. |
| EDMUND BURKE, on manners and laws: Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, in-sensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. |
| Education would be much more effective if Its purpose was to ensure that by The time They leave school Every boy and girl shook know how much They do no know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know It. |
| EDWIN LAND, inventor of the Polaroid camera, considers that at its best photography can be an extra sense, or a reservoir for the senses. Even when you don’t press the trigger, the exercise of focusing through a camera can make you better remember thereafter a person or a moment. Photography can teach people to look, to feel, to remember in a way that they didn’t know they could. |
| EDWIN WAY TEALE: “The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.” Not infrequently these words of the White Queen, coming down the years from behind Alice’s wonderland looking glass, recur to my mind. Remembering them, i slip a pencil stub and a small notebook into my pocket. The poet, Thomas Gray, was right : for anyone interested in accurate observation, one note set down on the spot is worth a cartload of reminiscences. |
| EFFICIENCY experts study the various incentives that speed up production in business and industry : bonuses, rivalry, praise, background music, etc. But psychologists have long been aware of another strong stimulus that has received much less notice. It’s simply to get the whole business—whatever you’re doing—over with. Called the “end spurt,” it’s comparable to the second wind that appears in both physical and mental activity when you’re in sight of a goal. Track runners are able to sprint faster as they near the finishing line; students can cram harder towards the end of a study period; factory workers step up their output just before closing time. This same “end spurt” also shows up on Fridays, when productivity is often higher, in anticipation of finishing the week’s work. |
| Elbert Hubbard: There are two kinds of discontent in this world : the discontent that works, and the discontent that wrings its hands. The first gets what its wants, and the second loses what it had. There is no cure for the first but success, and there is no cure at all for the second. |
| ELEANOR ROOSEVELT was sometimes humorous about what was required of the wife of a public man—especially when he was campaigning for office : “Always be on time. Never try to make any personal engagements. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Never be disturbed by anything. Always do what you’re told to do, as quickly as possible. Remember to lean back in a parade so that people can see your husband. Don’t get too fat to ride three on a seat. Get out of the way as soon as you’re not needed.” |
| The most interesting people are those about whom we continue to know the least—not because they surround themselves with mystery, but because some unconscious dignity in them forbids intrusion, and modesty keeps them from the easy confidence. To them, with their untold secrets, the imagination, fascinated, returns. |
| ELIZABETH GRAY VINING in The World in Tune: When I was in college, we had little use for faith, which we defined as “believing something that you know is not true.” It has taken me More than 15 years of living to know faith as the basis of action. living faith, faith in a book of directions, faith in oneself, faith in another’s word, written or spoken, faith in “the souls invincible surmise,” nothing, not even the simplest thing, would be done. From the child who takes his first step to the scientist who spends years in his laboratory testing and proving the hypothesis he has set up, all creative action is based on faith: The higher and nobler the object or force on which one sets one’s faith, the more daring and effective the action. |
| ELLEN GLASGOW, writing to her friend, Marion Gause Canby : I feel very near you, and I felt this at our first meeting. We met that first time with a strong sense of friendship. That is the kind of recognition one never forgets, and, strangely enough, because it is so sudden, it rarely betrays one. The feeling does not come often, but when it comes, it has a kind of inevitability, as if one discovered a kinship of personality |
| ELOQUENCE .. shaking hands with a northeast Storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only a the clinging touch of a child’s hand ,but there is as much potential Sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. |
| EMILY ANN SMITH, one-time professor of English at Berea College, Kentucky : I’ve learnt a lot from dogs. Years ago, I forced a daily spoonful of codliver oil down the throat of my German shepherd puppy. The dog slipped from my grasp one day, spill-ing the potion. Then he began licking the spoon. He liked the oil, but not my method of giving it to him. I’ve often put that over into teaching. What the teacher has, perhaps the student wants, if you just give it to him the right way. |
| EMILY KIMBROUGH:. “You haven’t changed a hit,” is an observation [ do not take to kindly. It is a form of greeting prevalent at school reunions, and I have seen its recipients simper with pleasure in a fashion that astonishes me. I have travelled, worked, borne children, lived in various communities and made many more friends and kinds of friends than comprised the group that surrounded me – in pigtail days, and I hope my looks show something of these experiences, To be told that nothing of this increase in richness and enjoyment of living shows, makes me indignant. |
| ENGLISH -novelist Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, on friendship: Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort, of feeling safe with a person ; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all Out just as they are, chaff and grain together., knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away. |
| EPICTETUS : If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself : “I used to be angry every day; then every other day; now only every third or fourth day.” When you reach 30 days, offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods. |
| Equal rights for women is OK, but there sure are some inequalities in their favor. How come diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but a man’s best friend is a dog? |
| ERIC SEVAREID : on the power of the press: I have never quite grasped the worry about the power of the press. After all, it speaks with a thousand voices, in constant dissonance. It has no power to arrest you, draft you,tax you or even make you fill out a form, except a subscription form if you’re agreeable. It is the power of government that has increased. Politicians have come to power in many countries and put press people in jail. I can’t think of any place where the reverse has occurred. |
| ERIC SEVAREID : Science is becoming the hallmark of our age and epoch. The conquest of nature is first of all a conquest of ignorance. Men can control only what they can understand. Science. in itself, is neither blessing nor terror; men make that decision—you and I. Benjamin Franklin put the question two centuries ago. It is still the big question. He said, in a letter to Josep Priestley, ”It is impossible to imagine the height to which the power of ma over matter may be carried in a thousand years. We in a way perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transport. Oh, that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement that men would cease to be wolves to one another !” |
| ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG, professor of criminal justice at the State Univer-sity of New York at Albany, on capital punishment: A failure to terminate a murderer’s life isn’t a celebration of human life but exactly the opposite. Those who believe in the sacred right of an individual to live his life span uninterrupted by murder cannot affirm their devotion to that principle by dealing frivolously with those who violate it. The proposition is best understood in a demonstration of reductin ud absurdum. A society that punishes a murderer by giving him a jail sentence of one week is a society that does not set much store by human life. A society that holds human life so sacred that it is prepared to execute anyone who takes another innocent human life is a society that believes deeply in the sacredness of human life. |
| ESKIMO artists, when they carve ivory, we are told, do not begin by deciding what to carve. They say, “I wonder what is inside,” As they carve, they gradually find it. It was there, waiting for discovery and release. |
| Even better than disarmament as a step towards permanent peace might be Some sort of international law that no new war could be started until all The books about The last One had been published. |
| Even the greatest of men sometimes lack the courage of their convictions. Einstein himself doctored up one of his formulas to conceal an apparent absurdity that later turned out to be true. |
| EVERY AGE HAS ITS rash of jitters. To be impressive however one set must be bigger .Just now we are having king sized jitters over the bomb-the big one .In their day other people got just steamed up over gunpowder Perhaps we should sleep better if we read more the timeless reflections of the lively thinkers of the past. James Russéil Lowell once wrote: “I take great comfort in God .I think He is considerably amused with us sometimes but likes us on the whole and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as He does, unless He knew that the framework of His universe was fireproof.” |
| EVERY EVENING for six summers now Old Nosey, the raccoon, has been coming to our terrace towards sunset, to receive the dog biscuits she relishes. She asks for her biscuits with dignified assurance, and likes to take them delicately from the donor’s ‘hand. But she is always apprehensive, always alert to run at any unfamiliar sound or threatening motion. And this is well. Like every form of dole, that which she gets from us is unreliable. When the house is occupied she can be sure of a meal” which fills her small stomach to. its highly elastic capacity. But occasionally this Bureau of Social Security is closed and Old Nosey must and does fend for herself until reopening . If she were not so nervous I would not expect to see her again when I come back. Anxiety, in short, is a. function of freedom. Only the fully domesticated animal, only the enslaved human being, can or should expect a life devoid of continuous tension. From tension, indeed, all human Progress springs. |
| EVERY household should contain a cat, not only for decorative and domestic values, but because the cat’s quiescence is medicinal to irritable, tense men and women. Few human beings understand the art of repose. They cannot let go. Now when a cat decides to rest, he not only lies down; he pours his body out on the floor like water. It is reposeful merely to watch him. The average man looks up from his newspaper and roars at the folly and stupidity of our law-makers; then he turns to see the family cat, who seems to put to the householder every day the Emersonian question: “So hot, my little sir ?” |
| EVERY MAN should be able to do something all by himself—something that gives him a sense of mastery : fly, sing, write, bake a good loaf of bread,. tap-dance, find a new star, carve in ivory. Man needs to solo. —Bruce Gould in American Story |
| Every Man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. |
| Every natural area in one respect has a common uniqueness. It takes everyone for ever to preserve it, but one person and one time to destroy it. —E. J. Koestner |
| EVERY person has his own natural stress level at which his mind and body function most efficiently. Any forced deviation from this natural base-line may have ill effects. In other words, it is just as bad to restrain a naturally active, energetic person from going at his own intense pace as it is to drive a passive, bucolic individual to attempt peak accomplishment. |
| Every scene ,even the commonest ,is wonderful ….if only one can detach oneself casting off all memory of, use and custom, and behold it as it were for the first time ; in its right , authentic colors ; without making comparisons. |
| Every successful man l have heard of has done the best he could with conditions as he found them and not waited until the next year for better |
| Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows the more things will he promptly consign to it—torn up to irrecoverable tatters |
| EX PRESIDENT Truman, asked about the possibility of nuclear war, told a story — In Missouri years ago there was a particularly dangerous junction of a railway and a highway, and I asked an engineer what should be done about it.- The engineer replied, “Don’t do a thing, It’s so dangerous it’s safe.” |
| EXPERIENCE proves that most time is wasted, not in hours, but in minutes. A bucket with a small hole in the bottom gets just as empty as a bucket that is deliberately kicked over. |
| FAIRY-TALES do not give a child his first idea of evil. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon; it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read an authentic account of how a giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart . GK Chesterton in ‘Tremendous Trifles |
| FAITH is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. This, is why Faith is such a necessary virtue. Unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you are just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. |
| FATE:Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around ,it comes to you. Stretch out your hand; take a portion of it politely. It passes on. Do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. ………Epictetus |
| FEW OF US listen with an open mind to those Who disagree with us. All we want to hear is a confirmation of our own opinions; when what we need to hear is an apposite viewpoint. When Darwin was in the field. he put down in his notebook every piece of evidence that seemed to contradict his theory of evolution because. as he later wrote: “If I did not, I would tend to forget the contradictory evidence. Since what stays in the mind is whatever we find most agreeable |
| Finally a soft voice commands closer attention than does a loud voice. People will hang on your every word only if they have to in order to catch every word. This is something that Mafia Dons have long known. |
| Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and some absurdities no doubt crept in ; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations ,to waste a moment on the yesterdays. |
| FISHING takes you away from the view of industrious people. Lazy men make the best fishermen. and they usually amount to something in the end, because they have time enough to unclutter their brains and get down to the real flat basics. |
| FL LUCAS : That eternal problem for East and West alike—how to be happy though married : There was once, says a Chinese tale, a household so happy that for nine generations none of its members had left it, except the daughters that marriage perforce took away. The fame of such domestic bliss reached the ears even of the Celestial Emperor. He sent to enquire the secret. The old father of the house, taking paper and brush, painted many characters, then handed his answer to the imperial envoy. But when the Son of Heaven unrolled it, there, was nothing there but the character for “Patience” repeated too times. This little tale, once heard, sticks in the memory like a burr. One could do worse than give it as a wedding present to every bridal pair on earth. |
| FOR 9,000 YEARS society has depended upon individuals for those creative achievements of mind and spirit that have guided it along the path of civilization. The spark from heaven falls. Who picks it up? The crowd? Never. The individual? Always. It is he and he alone, as artist, inventor, explorer, scholar, scientist, spiritual leader or statesman, who stands nearest to the source of life and transmits its essence to his fellow men. Wisdom and virtue cannot be forced from a crowd as eggs from chickens under electric lights. There is no such thing as general intelligence, There is only individual intelligence communicating itself to other individual intelligences. And there is no such thing as public morality. There is only a composite of private morality. |
| For A shrewd understanding of feminine psychology, It’s hard to beat j. B. Priestley’s observation: “She was not pretty, but she might have been handsome If Somebody had kept telling Her that she was pretty.” |
| FOR EVERY MAN , education should be a process which continues all his life. We have to abandon, as swiftly as possible, the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20? |
| FOR MORE THAN 10 years Professor Edwin Keedy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School used to start his first class by putting two figures on the blackboard : four and two. “What’s the solution ? he would ask. A student would call out, “Six.” Another would say, “Two.- But Keedy would pass them by. Several men would shout the final possibility, “Eight l” and the teacher would shake his head. Finally Keedy would point out their collective error. “All of you failed to ask the key question : What is the problem? Gentlemen, unless you know what the problem is, you cannot possibly find the answer.” Dr. Keedy’s classroom gambit was deadly serious. He knew that in law, as in everyday life, too much time is spent trying to solve the wrong problem—like polishing brass on a sinking ship. — |
| FOR PEOPLE of ambition , Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis had this advice: “Don’t sleep too much. If you sleep three hours less each night for a year, you will have an extra month and a half to succeed in.“ |
| For sheer artistic shaping power, nothing can compare with the daily, year in, year out, gentle abrasion of the woman who, like a river, keeps Rowing with an incessant, soft pressure through Her Man. |
| FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS:No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of continent .A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a manor of thy friend is washed away by the sea.Any mans death diminishes me ,because I am involved with mankind.Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. |
| FOR YEARS I was told by those who should know that man became a superior creature because of his opposable thumb, a thumb which enabled him to hold tools and use a pen or pencil to make a record of his ideas. But an opossum also has an opposable thumb. It is particularly evident on the hind feet, although the forefeet are almost as clearly divided into fingers and thumb.But did the opossum ever learn to hold a hammer or use a pen? He never even learned to use those unusual feet very adeptly for the most simple animal tasks. He can’t even climb very well without the help of his tail. So, when someone begins to pontificate on the amazing things man has done because he has an opposable thumb, I ask, “What about the opossum?” And the conversation shifts to the matter of brains, where it really belongs. |
| FORMER US SECRETARY Ray Marshall’s days as a child football player may help explain why a quiet southern boy held his own in Washington. When his mother died, it was Ray, at the age of 11 , who decided it was better for him and his live brothers and sisters to stay together than be split up by adoption. So they were all placed in the Mississippi Baptist Orphanage .“The orphanage football team never lost a game,” he once told an associate. “No one is as tough as an orphan.” – |
| Formula for handling people:1.Listen to the other person’s story.2.Listen to the other person’s full story.3.Listen to the other person’s full story, first.George Marshall |
| FRANK LLYOD WRIGHT , the famous architect who died recently, was never one to underestimate his talents. But in 1953, when he received the Gold Medal Award of the U. S. National Institute of Arts and Letters, he said: “A shadow falls: I feel coming on me a strange disease—humility.“ |
| FRANK LOESSER, the composer-lyricist who wrote such songs as Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, Baby, It’s Cold Outside and On a Slow Boat to China, liked to say that songs just popped into his head. “Of course,” he would add, “your head has to be arranged to receive them. Some heads are arranged so that they keep getting colds. I keep getting songs.” |
| FRANK NORRIS, American novelist and editor (1907-1967), on simplicity : Once I had occasion to buy a, silver soup ladle. The obliging sales-man brought forth quite an array of them, including ultimately one that was as plain and unadorned as the unclouded sky—and about as beauti-ful: But the price! It was nearly double any of the others. “You see,” the salesman explained, “in this highly ornamental ware the flaws don’t show. This plain one has to be the very best. Any defect would be apparent.” There, if you pleaSe, is a final basiS of comparison of all thing’s: the bare dicrnitv of the unadorned that may stand before the world . all unashamed, in the consciousness of perfection. |
| FREDERIC VAN DE WATER : Gardening, like all the important and most of the delightful things of life, is worth while only when you do it yourself. The indolent and wealthy can decree gardens and miss every drop of nectar they contain. Only folk with frequently soiled hands and almost permanent cricks in their backs during the growing season are aware of the manifold delights and dismays in the outwardly ‘mild avocation of gardening for fun. Actually it is a furious and nerve-straining pastime.. A sixteenth of an acre can furnish space for violent exercise of virtually all human emotions. |
| FREDERICK LOEWE, Vienna born composer of My Fair Lady arrived in the United States during the 1920s, he found the going difficult. Although he was a gifted pianist. he could find no market for his talent. One morning he was waiting gloomily for some men to arrive to repossess his piano. With a heavy heart. he sat down to play. Bent over the keyboard. he could hear nothing but the music, which he played with rare inspiration. When he finished, he was startled to find that he had an audience—three removal men, who were seated on the floor. ‘They said nothing. and made no movement towards the piano. Instead, they dug into their pockets, Pooled together enough money to pay the instalment due, placed it on the piano and walked away. |
| FRENCH WRITER , on points of view : To the poet, pearl is a tear of the sea to the Oriental, it is a drop of dew, solidified; to the ladies, it is a jewel which they wear on their finger, neck or ear. But for the chemist, it is a mixture of phosphate and carbonate of lime with a little gelatin. And for naturalists, it is simply a morbid secretion of the organ that among certain bivalves produces mother-of-pearl. |
| FREYA STARK in Beyond Euphrates: Perseverence is often praised, but it is not so often realized that another quality must accompany it to make it Of any value—and this is elasticity. Perseverance in only one direction very often fails: but if one is ready to take whatever road offers, and to change the chosen way if circumstances change, and yet to keep the end in view then success is infinitely more probable. |
| FREYA STARK in Perseus in Me Wind: In small, familiar things, memory weaves her strongest enchantments, holding us at her mercy with some trifle, some echo, a tone of voice, ‘a scent of tar and seaweed on the quay; we have all been explorers in our time, even if it was only when we learned to walk upon unsteady feet on the new carpet of our world; and it is those forgotten explorations that come back. It is rare in later life to drink such draughts as we do in childhood of the world’s wonder, whose first depth remains through all our days. — |
| FRIENDSHIPS, family ties, the companionship of little children, an autumn forest flung in prodigality against a deeply blue sky, the intricate design and haunting fragrance of a flower, the counterpoint of a Bach fugue or the melodic line of a Beethoven sonata, the fluted note of bird song, the glowing glory of a sunset.The world is aflame with the things of the eternal moment !!World aflame !!! |
| Frustration is commonly The difference between What You would like to be and What You are willing to sacrifice to become What You would like to be. |
| FUN is a word we once reserved for children. Adults did not have fun , they had pleasure. Today, in our passion to be happy we are not only substituting childish pleasures for adult behaviour,. We are subtly Changing the very goals of that behaviour. Spend has replaced Save . Be happy has replaced-achieve something. —Leo Rosten |
| GANDHI had this sign on the wall to his room at Sevagram. his last home: “When you are in the right you can afford to keep your temper, and when you are in the wrong you cannot afford to lose it.” —Chester Bowies. |
| GEORGE SANTAYANA in Reason in Society: Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree. it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between men and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies precisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding, but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the dark. |
| GEORGE WALD, an authority on the chemistry of vision : Years ago I used to worry about the degree to which I had specialized. My studies involved only the rods and cones of the retina, and in them only the visual pigments. But it is as though this were a very narrow window through which at a distance one can see only a crack of light. As one comes closer the view grows wider and wider, until finally one is looking at the universe. It is like the pupil of the eye, an opening only two to three millimetres across in daylight, but yielding a wide angle of view, and manoeuvrable enough to be turned in all directions. I think this is the way it always goes in science, because science is all one. It hardly matters where one enters, provided one can come closer, and then one does not see less and less, but more and more. |
| GEORGE WASHINGTON : My observation is that whenever one person is ‘found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein. |
| GEORGE. KENT on pride: Remember the Spanish knight of legend who was starving, yet each evening walked in the square proudly picking his teeth as if after a copious repast. |
| GEORGES GURDJEFF, on natural man: Each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances. But put him into even only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role. For a short time, he becomes himself. |
| GERALD HORTON BATH , in Whatsoever Things: Learn to smile with your eyes. Successful portrait photographers know that if they can get a person’s eyes to smile they need not worry about the rest of the face. They keep suggesting pleasant thoughts to their customers until the eyes soften —and speak. Why should such a good trick be reserved for photographic studios’ Why not put your best face forward all the time?’ When you meet people, instead of the rubber smile which you have been clicking on and off on such occasions, greet them with a smile that will be remembered—one done with your eyes! Your mouth will take care of itself. You have known plenty of people who could criticize with their eyes. It is just as easy to be gracious and friendly with them.A man and wife who really want to have a happy life together will do well to bear in mind a suggestion offered by a minister of the Church of Scotland: Love has eyelids as well as eyes. |
| GERMAN ARTIST and author Gunter Grass writes: When I was 32, I became famous. Since then, Fame has been ever at myside. He’s always standing around; he’s a nuisance, hard to get away from. Visitors who think they’ve come to see me look around for him.He’s getting fat. He’s beginning to quote himself. I often rent him out for a small fee for receptions and garden parties. I am amazed at the stories he tells me afterwards. He likes to have his picture taken, forges my signature to perfection, and reads what I scarcely look at: reviews. |
| GERRY CARR , member of the Skylab 4 crew, on viewing earth from outer space: I would look at the earth’s horizon and see the earth’s atmosphere. It is very beautiful. It is blue and white and gold and orange. And it is so thin and fragile. That atmosphere is all that keeps earth habitable, but it’s no thicker than the skin on orange no, thinner than that, like the skin on an apple. There’s no way to explain how clearly you can see the fragility of the earth. You have to have been there.” |
| Get the right perspective.When Goliath came against Israelites the soldiers thought “He is so big, we can never kill him.”David looked at the same man and thought, ”He is so big, I can’t miss him”. |
| GK CHESTERTON : All our controversies are confused by certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were always unmeaning; Which are not merely in-applicable, but were always intrinsically useless. We recognize them wherever a man talks of “the survival of the fittest,” meaning only the survival of the survivors; or where a man talks about “going on towards Progress,” which only means going on towards going on; or when a man talks about “government by the wise few,” as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. “The wise few” must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who think themselves wise. |
| GK. CHESTERTON : Despotism, and attempts at despotism, are a kind of disease of public spirit they represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overWhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon the wild desire to manage everything themselves. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy, almost without exception. But nobody can say it is not public-spirited. The sin.and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too’ much, and trusts them too little. |
| GK. CHESTERTON was once asked to serve on a jury. Afterwards he wrote : Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining theguilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to he trusted to trained men. When it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who on feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity. —Tremendous Trifles (Methuen, London) |
| God could cause us the keenest embarrassment if He were to reveal to us all the secrets of nature.For boredom and lack of interest we wouldn’t know what to do |
| GOLFERS and scientists have quite a lot in common. They both face problems of their own choosing. And they take frank delight in the neverending process of trying to solve theproblems |
| Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the company. |
| GOOD relationship has a pattern like dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not nee to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. There is to place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back—it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. —Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From the Sea |
| GRATITUDE does not consist of loving a person who does us a service and of doing him a service in return. It consists of profiting by the service that has been done, so that we can act as well as possible towards the whole of humankind, and not only towards thc individual to whom we are grateful. —Frederic Paulhan |
| GUSTAVE FALUBERT : The most glorious moments in your life are not the socalled days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair, you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments. |
| HABIT IS THE enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. —William James |
| Habits are about the only servants that will work for You for nothing. Just get them established, and they will operate Even though You are going around in a trance |
| HAD good dreams, and woke now and then to think, and watch the moon. I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy. –Louisa May Alcott at the age of 12: entry in her’diary |
| HAL BORLAND : Man is a natural fire tender, has been since the cave man who first tamed fire. Not long ago I inspected a supermodern house with glass walls on all sides, no partitions, automatic central heating—and a fireplace in the middle! The hearth fire is as antiquated as the stone arrowhead—yet we cling to it generation after generation. The reasons are all twined with intangibles as thin as wood smoke. The man who builds a hearth fire wants to see the flames leap at his command and feel the glow and hear the simmering log. Don’t ask .me why. I’m a prejudiced witness. My hearth fire is going right this minute. |
| HAL BORLAND in This Hill, This Valley: The cows have cut a path across the pasture from the lower gate diagonally to the fence, then out towards a wild cherry tree, round the tree, back to the fence, across Millstone Brook and, by a winding route, to the far end of the upper pasture. They take this path going and coming, single file, each time cutting it a little deeper. I have walked that path repeatedly, wondering why a cow should have chosen that particular route. I think that if I had laid out that path I should have fixed my eye on the destination and gone straight to it. Then I look back on my own life, to where I started and where I went in my journey before I arrived where I am now, and by contrast with my path this cow path is ruler-straight. I suppose the whole matter turns upon the question whether the objective or the journey is more important, And I know that when I meet a man who has gone directly to his objective, I too often find him a narrow man with little range of experience. —Simon and Schuster |
| HANNAH LEES : Doting parents would do well to remember that in doing everything for a child and expecting nothing we do the child a disservice. Children as a rule do not want to he indulged; they want to be responsible. Over-indulgence is the ultimate insult, for when you “spoil” a child you are practically saying, “I know you aren’t capable of being civilized and considerate and contributing, and I won’t expect it of you.” |
| Happiness has a habit of pursuing the person who feels grateful to his God, comfortable with his conscience, in favor with his friends, in love with his labors and in balance with his bank. |
| Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right and true ; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the Gods. Wise men have an inner sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man’s own breast. Trust thyself. Aristotle |
| HAPPINESS, according to many philosophers, is a state of being that nobody recognizes while they are happy but can recollect all too clearly when they are unhappy—like the bachelor who ran after women and caught one. |
| HARLAN MILLER in There’s a Man in the House: Conversations should be fired in short bursts; anybody who talks steadily for more than a minute is in danger of boring somebody. |
| HAROLD KOHN : “Oh, Mr. Paderewski,” said a woman to the Polish pianist, “you must have had a world of patience to learn to play as you do.” ‘It’s not that at all, my dear woman,” replied Paderewski. have no more patience than anyone else. It’s just that I use mine.” |
| HAROLD MACMILLAN, former British prime ministek, recalling a professor’s advice: “Nothing you learn better at Oxford,” he told us in his opening remarks, “will be of the slightest possible use to you later, save only this : that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.” |
| HAROLD NICOLSON : I regard sloth as the major cause of melancholy, in that it provokes. a sense of inadequacy, and therefore of self-reproach, and therefore of guilt, and finally of fear. Melancholy is caused less by the failure to achieve great ambitions or desires than by the inability to perform small necessary acts. |
| HARRIET VAN HORNE: It’s easy enough to smile at young men who experiment with beards, sideboards and strange, topiary moustaches. Such experimentation is one of the joys of passing through puberty. Girls trying out hair tints and sultry eye shadows are obeying the same instincts. But goatees and furry sideboards on men over 55 strike me as regrettable. Also unkissable. I wonder, moreover, about the reason behind the whiskers. An older man befurring his face is betraying his anxieties. He wants too much to be “with it,” to swing, however stiff in the knees, with the younger generation. As Marshall McLuhan would say, it’s the surrender of the individual to the tribal soul . |
| HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK : The reading of biography gives a man a wide perspective on his own life’s problems. A man who has read many biographies has lived vicariously through many lives. Biography makes a man feel at home with anything that can happen to him. Successes are less likely to turn his head, failures less likely to oppress his heart. He has seen life work out its issues too often to overestimate prosperity or to overem-phasize calamity. When health is troublesome he feels himself in a notable succession of handicapped men who have made good; when temptation comes he is likely to recall the lesson of all biography that no sin is without its Nemesis; and when old age comes he can lift with understanding heart the ancient prayer : “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.” |
| HARRY GOLDEN : One of our “big lies,” and one which men, who invented it, dearly love to hug to their breasts is that women cannot be trusted with a secret. This is an old technique—attaching to someone else (as a symbol of prejudice) the trait which you hate most in yourself. Men of course blabber all over the place—among themselves, and to the wives, mothers, children and sweethearts of their best friends; but women never. Women never tell on each other. It is part of the “united front” againstmen, which women have had since antiquity. The woman, novelist, or shopgirl, has not yet appeared who would dare violate the unwritten rules of this millionyearold alliance. |
| Harry Lee Neal: Today we enjoy the pleasant fantasy that modern society is the first to enjoy the benefits of psychology. However, it is well to remember the Sioux Indians, who told their children that butterfly wings smeared over their hearts would enable them to run as fleetly as antelope. Any boy who sets out to catch a dozen butterflies, without the help of a net, is going to be a pretty good runner by the time summer is over. |
| HARVEY ARDEN, on materialism : I spoke with a Bedouin man who was tending olive trees, from which he had just harvested a basket of olives. “Do you own this land?” I asked. He shook his head. “The land belongs to Allah,” he said. “What about the trees ?” I asked. “The trees, too, are Allah’s.” I marvelled at this man, who seemed unencumbered by material considerations, when he suddenly added. “Of course, I own the olives l” — National Geographic. |
| HATE THE ACTIONS Not the Man I remember that when Christian teachers told me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not the man, I used to think this a silly, strawsplitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man for whom I had been doing this all my life—myself. —C. S. Lewis |
| HAVE YOU noticed how shore birds and gulls face into the wind when they are at rest on the beach? Of courseit keeps their feathers in perfect position. A good philosophy is to face your troubles; don’t let them ruffle your feathers. |
| HEART surgeon Michael De Bakey said, in a discussion about recreational exercise, “When you do eight to ten operations a day, you’re doing a lot of exercise. I relax in what I do. I don’t need to do something else. If people would enjoy what they do, they would find that there’s nothing to compete with it.” |
| Helen Keller in The Open Door: The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage —the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood or lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature has de-prived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intoler-ance has destroyed. |
| HELEN KELLER: I who am blind can give one hint to those who see : Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never taste and smell again. Glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you; make the most of every sense. |
| HENRY BESTON on deterioration of Language One of the greater mischiefs which confront us today is the growing debasement of the language; on the one hand vulgarized and on the other corrupted with a particularly odious academic jargon. This is dangerous. A civilization which loses its power over its own language has lost its power over the instrument by which it thinks .Without this power there is no accuracy or greatness of thought ;Northern Farm |
| HENRY BESTON who spent a year living in a tiny shack on a windswept section of sand dunes on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Wrote about his experience thus :Some have asked me what understanding of nature one shapes from so strange a year. I would answer, one’s first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active today as they have ever been, and that tomorrow’s morning Will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now. It is as impossible to live without reverenceas without joy.— The Outermost House (Holt, Rinehart and Willston) |
| HENRY JAMES in The Art,of Fiction: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider’s web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. |
| HENRY STEEL COMMAGER : It is a paradox that just when technology has made it possible for parents to spend more of their time than ever before in training their children, they should foist so much of the responsibility upon the schools. |
| Here is the secret of inspiration. Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people ,not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you. William Feather |
| HETH PEARSON, On the importance of enemies James Whistler, the painter, loved his enemies because, he said, they kept one always busy. When critic Tom Taylor died, in 1880, a friend met Whistler walking down Piccadilly. “Why do you look so sad ?” he asked. Whistler replied, “Tom Taylor is dead. I am lonesome. They are all dying, I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.” – |
| Heywood Braun: The wise thing to do is to divide all people into two classes—friends and strangers. Friends we love too well to gossip about; strangers we know too little. |
| HISTORIAN Arthur Schleisinger on blind obedience : The notion that a authority is entitled to reverence per se is the most subversive of all notions in a free society. “T’her s no worse heresy,” Lord Acton wrote, than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Authority is entitled only to the respect it earns, and not a whit more_ |
| HISTORIAN Charles Beard, asked if he could summarize the lessons of history, replied : 1. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. 2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. 3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. |
| HOKUSAI, nineteenth-century Japanese artist, : From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was 50 I had published an infinity of designs; but all I have produced before 70 is not worth taking into account. At 73 I learnt a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds and fishes. In consequence, when I am 80, I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100 I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am 110 everything I do, be it but a dot, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I do to see if! do not keep my word. Written at the age of 75 |
| HOME is a destination—the ultimate destination. “Going home” has a meaning more poignant than perhaps any other phrase.It is first spoken with true feeling by the child just turned loose from his playpen to explore the wide world of the neighbouring gardens. His first crushing experience with disappointment, or anger, or physical hurt brings a torrent of emotion that ends with a tiny voice piping : “I’m going home.”Home is the sanctuary where the healing is. |
| HORACE MANN, an eminent nineteenth-century American educator, once delivered an address at the opening of a reformatory for boys. He made the statement that if only one boy were saved from ruin it would pay for all the cost and care and labour of establishing such an institution. Later, in private, a gentleman tested Mann: “Did you not colour that a little when you said all the expense and labour would be repaid if it saved one boy?” “Not if it was my boy,” replied Mann. A. Purnell Bailer, Los Angeles Times Syndicate |
| HOTEL OWNER CEZAR RITZ was a perfectionist. A few hours before the gala opening of the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1898, Ritz came into the dining room. By six o’clock, the last preparations had been made. Ritz sat down at a table. He noticed at once that it was about two centimetres too high. He sat down at the next table. It was two centimetres too high. So were a third and a fourth table. Ritz gave a few orders. By eight o’clock the legs of all tables in the dining room had been shortened by two centimetres.Cesar Ritz’s son, Charles, now chairman of the board of the Ritz I-Iotel, remembers that his father tried out very new mattress he ordered by sleeping one night on it. If he didn’t sleep well, the mattress was returned.- Dining at the Pavilion |
| HOW CAN we judge the work of a society? On what basis is it possible for us to predict how well a nation will survive and prosper? We propose this criterion: the concern of one generation for the next. If the children and the youth of A nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the full, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglect its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise. |
| HOW OFTEN our conversation is meaningless and inconsequential! When William Gillette, the actor, was a young man, he lived in a boarding-house. At that time he was studying stenography and practised shorthand while sitting in the dra wing-room with other boarders and listening to their conversation. Evening after evening he took down every word they spoke. Re-ferring to this experience, Mr. Gillette once told a friend, “Years later I went over my notebooks, and found that in four months of incessant conversation no one had said anything that made any difference to anybody.” |
| HOW often our conversation is meaningless and inconsequential! When William Gillette, the actor, was a young man, he lived in a boarding-house. At that time he was studying stenography and practised shorthand while sitting in the drawing-room with other boarders and listening to their conversation. Evening after evening he took down every word they spoke. Referring to this experience. Mr. Gillette once told a friend, “Years later I went over my notebooks, and found that in four months of incessant conversation no one had said anything that made any difference to anybody.” –Harold Kohn in Thoughts Aftdd |
| HUBERT HUMPHREY, former US Vice-President, on the good old days : They Were never that good, believe me, the good new days.are today, and better days are coming tomorrow. Our greatest songs are still Unsung. |
| HUMAN NATURE : A simple experiment will distinguish two types of human nature. Gather a throng of people and put them on a ferry boat. By the time the ferry has swung into the river you will find that a certain proportion have climbed upstairs in order to be out in the deck and see what is to be seen as they cross over. The rest have settled indoors to lose themselves in apathy or tobacco smoke.We may divide the passengers into two classes :Those who are interested in crossing the river. Those who are merely interested in getting across.We can apply this discovery to every walk of our life |
| I AM ENTHUSIASTIC over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat may come along and make a fortuitous life preserver. This is not to say, though, that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. —R.Buckminister Fuller |
| I AM IMPATIENT with the notion that this age is one of the worst in the world’s history. Matthew Arnold claimed the honour for the age before this, Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. And so on back through literature. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God. |
| I AM IN favour of the love song. I do not think the honourable profession of songwriting can flourish without it, and I have strong doubts that love can flourish without it either. The songwriter can create the appropriate mood, bring back memories, ease a pain (or prolong one). He can supply words for the tongue-tied and lift the hearts of the lonely. Nearly every day I receive at least one letter from someone telling me how much a song of mine has meant to him. And I would like to think that love songs—of all themes and tempos—do something to dispel the conflicts and the tensions that are so much a part of our daily lives, and help create bonds of sympathy. After all, as someone said, nobody has yet written a hit song about hate. |
| I AM not one of those who imagine that the modern world can get away from specialization. In this connection I always recall a Marx Brothers film in which Groucho played a shady lawyer. When a client commented on the dozens of flies buzzing round his shabby office, Groucho said, “We have a working agreement with them. They don’t practise law, and we don’t climb Walls.“ |
| I AM unable to find any warrant for the belief that any period has offered men the kind of peace and certainty that the modern age is clamouring for. The Middle Ages was a period of fearful rnaladministratiori. The Greeks led the most chaotic, Passionate and disorderly life conceivable. They preached serenity, but calm composure and discipline were with them, as they are with us, an individual achievement. |
| I ASKED a friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods what she had observed. “Nothing in particular” How was that possible, I asked myself.I who could not hear or see,find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. .I pass my hands lovingly about the rough shaggy bark of a pine. Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song. — Helen Keller |
| I BET A FRIEND of mine that if I gave him a bird-cage and hung it up in his house he would have to buy a bird. He took the bet. So I bought him an at-tractive bird-cage made in Switzerland, and he hung it near his dining-room table. Of course you know what hap-pened. People would come in and say, “Joe, when did your bird die?” “I never had a bird,” he would say. “Well, then, what have you got a bird-cage for?” He said it was simpler to go and buy a bird than to have to explain why he had the bird-cage. You have to hang bird-cages in your mind. And finally you get something to put in them. —Charles Kettering. Prophet of Progress |
| I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon earth and be an atheist;But I can’t conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God. Abraham Lincoln |
| I Don’t think that anyone in Life can escape politics. Even refusing to take politics into account is political: by doing so, You play the wrong kind of politics. |
| I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like a male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continued becoming , with a goal in front ,not behind. |
| I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.” |
| I FIND the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we Must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. -Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| I HAVE always disliked the phrase “fall in love.” I object to “fall.” It implies that we are walking calmly along when suddenly—a hole, and we fall in ! Real love always takes time. You would not expect to plant a seed and find it full-grown overnight. It needs proper soil and nourishment to achieve its full growth and beauty. So does love. I do not say that “love at first sight” may not later turn into love, just as I do not say the planted seed may not grow to maturity. I do say, though, that it needs time. —Dr. Murray Bunks |
| I HAVE BEEN told that cycling strengthens your heart, shores up your vigour and scours out your arterial system. I cycle because I like it. When you are in a car, you are packed, you are insulated. You can’t hear ; you can’t smell; you can’t see anything that extends very far beyond edges of the road. The car is your environment. When you ride a bicycle, you are a part of the outside world. You cut across a huge, clear mosaic of physical detail and human vagary. As poet Robert Bridges wrote, “Our stability is but balance, and conduct lies in masterful administration of the unforeseen.” This is the definition of cycling. The rider is a sort of urban surfer working through the fierce waves of traffic with his frail machine. And, all the while, he is precariously perched over one of man’s most satisfying inventions, the wheel. Getting tilere is all the fun. |
| I HAVE HAD A very varied and interesting life, have lived in some extremely beautiful places and have met some remarkable people. But now that I have reached “the end game,” the figures that still stand out are the people to whom I have been bound by affection. I realize it is only through them that I have learnt anything about life at all. All of my past life that has not faded into mist has passed through the filter of my affections. What was not warmed by them is now for me as if it had never been |
| I HAVE HAD THE rarest ,the finest friends. I have loved my friends; the rarest wits of my generation were my boon companions; everything conspired to enable me to gratify my body and my brain; and do you think this would have been so if I had been a good man? If you do, you are a fool; good intentions and bald greed go to the wall, but subtle selfishness with a dash of unscrupulousness pulls more plums out of life’s pie than the seven deadly virtues.If you are good man you want a bad one to convert; If you are a bad man you want a bad one to go out on a spree with.George Moore.-Conversations in Bury Street. |
| I HAVE made a major discovery in clinical medicine : “The busiest people have no time to be ill.” Executives who are, or think they are, indispensable at the office have minor indispositions that begin on Friday night and disappear by Monday morning. Their major illnesses immediately follow the cad of some major task, and if the work continues at crisis level they do not fall sick at all. They become as immune as doctors during an epidemic, mothers with large families, or sailors during a gale at sea. This known fact would convince us –even if we did not already suspect it—that there is a voluntary element in many an illness. The patient has dropped his subconscious guard and allowed himself to collapse. He wants a rest and can see no other way to get it. —C. Northcote Parkinson |
| I HAVE SOMETIMES dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.” —Virginia Woolf, The Sezond Common Reader |
| I KNOW A MAN who always carries a cut stone in his pocket, and delights to hold it in his hand. “At last I have found something both exquisite and everlasting,” he says. One day he has with him a cube of purple fluorspar from Derbyshire, or perhaps a pyramid of smoky quartz from Cumberland. The next it may be rock crystal from Madagascar. To him the sense of tenancy in life is stronger than in anyone I know. “We are passing through,” he says, “passing through. Flowers fade, timber crumbles, metal corrodes, but these stones will remain.” On my own table is a section of agate, cut and polished, its concentric rings of rose, ivory and carmine enclosing a turbulent mass of amethyst. I bought it some years ago for a few shillings, and no expenditure has ever brought greater reward. Its depths are always there, clear and refreshing, a petrified pool never to be disturbed by wind or tide. Few people realize the beauty of even the commonest of stones yet the insect who makes his home in a pile of gravel on the roadside lives in a palace. |
| I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower ,its colors richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of innocence of spring ,nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content. Lin Yutang |
| I LIKE TO COMPARE compare basic research to mountain climbing in an unexplored’ range. Considerable preparation, training and strong motivation are required to get to the upper altitudes, even if no one stretch of the way is particularly difficult. But, once you’re there, it is relatively easy to see vistas, or even to stumble across new riches. The breakthroughs in scientific and technological achievements, like the discovery of fission and the development of the technology to utilize it, will come most surely in the field of basic research. |
| I LOVE the tools made for mechanics. I stop at the windows of hardware stores to look at them. If I could only find an excuse to buy many more of these tools on the pretence that I have use for them! They are so beautiful, simple and plain and straight to their meaning. There is no “art” about them. They have not been made beautiful, they are beautiful. —-Robert Henri |
| I LOVE WORKING in the earth and with the earth, but I like to know that it is my own earth that I am delving in. I would as soon think of renting a child to love as a piece of land. When I plant a seed or root, I plant a bit of my heart with it and do not feel that I have finished when I have had my exercise and amusement. But I do feel not so far removed from God when the tender leaves put forth and I know that in a manner I am a creator. My heart melts over a bed of young peas,. ” and a blossom on my rose tree is like a poem written by my son. —Fanny Stevenson in Our Samoan Adventure |
| I MARRIED for the first time at 37. I got the man I wanted. It could be construed as something of a miracle, considering how old I was and how eligible he was.But I don’t think it’s a miracle. I think I deserved him. For 17 years I worked hard to become the kind of woman that might interest him. And when he finally walked into my life, I was just wordly enough, relaxed enough, financially secure enough (for I also worked hard at my job) and adorned with enough glitter to attract him. He wouldn’t have looked at me when I was 20, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with him . |
| I ONCE HAD A friend whose ambition in life was to acquire experiences worth owning. His argument was that they constitute the only real wealth in world. An experience that is really Worth having and owning, he would point out, does not have to be insured. lt is never subject to any tax,and your executor will never have to account for it. And your heirs will relish their recollection of your tale of it”. Such an experience, he used to say, was about the only thing a man could acquire that someone else did not have some kind of stake in. Such experiences are really your own , to have and to hold for keeps. A man can relive them in his mind all his life. |
| I ONCE asked chess champion Boris Spassky, “Don’t you find that, as a result of playing chess, you have acquired the habit of working out in advance all your moves in life, too? Doesn’t that interfere with life’s spontaneity?” Spassky thought for a moment and answered, “Well, yes, its true that I am sometimes too calculating in cer-tain situations. But life is the sort of opponent who occasionally makes such unexpected moves that no matter how much you want to, you can never think up the reply in advance.” —Yergeny Yertuthenko |
| I REMEMBER one winter, my dad needed firewood and he found a dead tree and sawed it down. In the spring, to his dismay new shoots sprouted around the trunk. He said, ”I sure thought it was dead. The leaves had all dropped in wintertime. It was so cold that the twigs snapped as if there were no life left in the old tree. But now I see there was still life at the taproot”.He looked at me and said “Bob, don’t forget this important lesson. Never cut a tree in wintertime. Never make a decision in low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in the worst mood. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come. Then it will be time for you take a decision. |
| I resolved to ask her (Anna Akhmatova) : now after so many years of work, when she writes something new, does she have a sense of being armed , of having experience , of a path already trodden?Or is it a step into the unknown , a risk every time ?”Naked.On naked soil.Every Time” she answered.After a pause she added : ” A lyric poet follows a terrible path.A poet has such difficult material : the word …The word is much more difficult material than, for instance, paint.Think about it, really:For the poet works with the very same words that people use to invite each other to Tea”Lydia Chukovskaya |
| I SEE HISTORY as a relay race in which each one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage farther the challenge of being a man. I refuse to find anything final in our biological, intellectual or physical limitations; my hope knows no frontiers; so confident am I of the outcome of the struggle that sometimes I experience a gaiety, an intoxication of hope, a certainty of victory so intense that, on our ageold battlefield covered with rusty shields and broken swords, I still feel as if I were standing on the eve of our first fight. A spark of confidence, of atavistic gaiety, keeps glowing in me, and it only needs a darkening of the shadows around me to blow it into a triumphant flame. Human stupidity may make the angels weep, but it always seems to me that men are never more clearly its victims than when they are its instruments. — in Promise at Dawn (Michael Joseph, London) |
| I SHALL pass through this life but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do Or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, Let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, For I shall not pass this way again. |
| I studied The lives of great men and famous women; and I found that The men and women-Who got to The top were those who did The jobs They, had in hand, with Everything They had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work. |
| I THINK one reason we admire cats, those of us who do, is their proficien-cy in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing—or pretend they do. Rarely do you see a cat discom-fited. They have no conscience, and ,• they never regret. Maybe we secretly envy them. —Barbara Webster in Creozures and Contentment: |
| I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine,without herbs, without any witch’s magic;And that is ,IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED,THEN LOVE. Senecas’Letters from a stoic. |
| I wonder if the mirror isn’t the world’s worst invention. The optimist. looks into a mirror and becomes too optimistic, the pessimist too pessimistic. Thus mirrors increase conceit or destroy confidence. Far better is seeing ourselves as reflected in the expressions on the faces of people we meet during the day. The way you look to others is apt to be nearer the truth than the way you may look to yourself. |
| I WONDER WHAT IT would be like to be on a spaceship,” mused my ten-year-old boy. “You’re on one,” I told him. “And you have been all your life.” The earth is a very small spaceship, by astronomical standards. It is only 8,000 miles in diameter, which makes it just a tiny speck in our galaxy. And our galaxy is only one of millions. Yet this tiny speck has sustained thousands of millions of human passengers for more than two million years as it has orbited in the solar system. It shows no signs of running down for millions of years more, and all it needs is radiation from the sun to keep it going and to regenerate life “on board.” If we could implant in our children, at an early age, this concept of a global spaceship, they might possibly be more prepared, in attitude and action, to treat one another as crew members should, when they grow up. |
| I WRITE as I walk,” said H. G. Wells, “because I want to get somewhere. I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can—because that is the best way to get there.” |
| IAN MCLEOD , who served in the War-time cabinet, recalls that Churchill was one of the great romantics. “Cavalier and sea dog; historian and statesman;soldier and journalist; even a painter and a scholar in his fashion, Churchill was them all. Tears came as naturally to him as did courage. In this, as in so many things, he was a true Elizibethan, a knight of the spacious days of Elizabeth I who had somehow strayed. into the reign of Elizabeth ll.“One evening in the late 1940s we went to Chartwell to dine and see a film. It was set in Vienna. Boy meets girl. They part. Years later when next they meet she is an opera singer, he the rising‘ star ol the Austrian cavalry.He does not recognize her, and the story ends in a mist of Strauss waltzes. It would be hard to imagine a more predictable plot.“Yet it cast a shadow over the next hour as Churchill, lower lip jutting out, kept muttering, ‘l cannot understand. how he could have forgotten her.’ |
| If at first you don’t succeed, try,try again.If you still don’t succeed, stop trying. Sit down and think it over.Persistence is a noble virtue. But it is no substitute for evaluation. |
| IF I HAD INFLUENCE with good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial ,the alienation from the sources of our strength. |
| IF I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favour-able auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye. —Henry Thoreau |
| IF it requires a person or object to make you happy. you don’t know what happiness is. But if you can stand alone in the midst of any hard. situation, doing a required or routine task with love and peace in your heart, you know something about happiness. —Gwen Cummings |
| If only One could have two lives: the first in which to make One’s mistakes, which seem as If they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them. |
| IF only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the test of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece ot his own heart |
| If only we wish to be happy this could be easily accomplished ; but we wish to be happier than other people and this is always difficult ,for we believe others to be happier than they are. |
| If there is a rumour in the air about you, you’d better treat it as you would a wasp: either ignore it or kill it with the first blow. Anything else will just stir it up |
| IF WE IMAGINE the whole of earth’s history compressed into a single year, then, on this scale, the first eight months would be completely without life. The following two months would be devoted to the most primitive of creatures, ranging from viruses and single-cell bacteria to jellyfish, while mammals would not have appeared until the second week in December. Man, as we know him, would have strutted on to the stage at about 11.45 p.m. on December 31. The age of written history would have occupied little more than the last 60 seconds on the clock. —Richard Carrington, A Guide to Earth History (Chatto & Windus) |
| IF WE pulled together as much to put over a siege of peace as we do a spell of war, we would be sitting pretty. Peace is kind of like prosperity—there are mighty few nations that can stand it. —Will Rogers |
| IF YOU are a happy parent, you give your son or daughter an invaluable legacy. It doesn’t matter very much whether you’re rich or poor—although, let’s not delude ourselves, rich is better. But if the choice is between happy-poor and unhappy-rich, the children of a laughing pauper are the ones to envy. They will grow up with the expectation that life is good, that the world is a sunny and friendly place, that other people are as human and decent as they are, that it’s fun to be alive. And with that attitude they can accomplish almost anything. —Guy Wright, San Francisco Examines |
| If you have anything valuable to contribute to the world, it will come through the expression of your own personality-that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature. |
| If you intend to break a rule or regulation, never ask first if you can do it. Break it. If you ask first you are practically committing two offences instead of one. |
| IF you lose love—in whatever manner—the pain is lasting and deep. But personally I subscribe to the old theory of getting back on the horse after the fall. There should always be a next in life—a next cat, a next dog, or husband or whatever. There are too many joys you forgo by being so niggardly with love, so afraid to be hurt. —Vivian Cristo!, Good-Time Charlie |
| If you would have a happy family life , remember two things : In matters of of principle stand like a rock.In matters of taste swim with the current. |
| If You would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of Yourself; If with a little mind, leave him a favorable impression of himself. |
| Ignazio Silone in Bread and Wine: Liberty isn’t a thing you have been given as a present. You can be a free man under a dictatorship. It is suffi-cient if you struggle against it. He who thinks with his own head is a free man. He who struggles for what he believes to be right is a free man. Even if you live in the freest country in the world and are lazy, callous, apathetic, irresolute, you are not free but a slave, though there be no coercion and no opposition. Liberty is something you have to take for yourself. There is no use beg-ging it from others. –Ace Book,. London |
| ILLIAM DEWITT HYDE Hyde: An educator’s advice to his students : Get your grammar right and all other needful things will fall to you. Live in the active voice, not the pas-sive. Think more about what you make happen than about what happens to you. Live in the indicative mood, rather than the subjunctive. Be concerned with things as they are, rather than as they might be. Live in the present tense, facing the duty at hand without regret for the past or worry over the future. Live in the first person, criticizing yourself rather than finding fault with others. Live in the singular number, caring more for the approval of your own conscience than for the applause of the crowd. And if you want a verb to conjugate, you cannot do better than to take the verb “to love.” |
| Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will. —George Bernard Shaw, |
| IN 1972. Mexico’s President Luis Echeverria asked the University of Yucatan to reserve the honorary degree they wished to bestow on him for the end of his term five years away “ to see if I really deserve it.” |
| IN every age but this one, society has punished the lady who ceased to be a lady. It is only in this strange time that the lady who strays is rewarded while society is punished. Her reward —and society’s punishment is one of those “as told to” books, in which the modern heroine, loose of both tongue and morals, can lick her chops over her struggle with drugs, alcohol or any other handy form of degradation. |
| IN 1948, William Faulkner scribbled a reply across the bottom of a letter from an old friend who wanted to do a New Yorker magazine profile on him: “Oh, hell no! Come down and visit whenever you can, but no piece in any paper about me as I am working tooth and nail at my lifetime ambition to be the last private individual on earth and expect every success since apparently there is no competition for the place.” |
| IN a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature. |
| IN Africa I have sometimes come upon the iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a riverbed. Nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones; the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, lik a comees luminous tail. Once I shot an iguana. I though that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strong thing happened then, that I have never forgotten. As I went up to him where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, the iguana was as dead as a sandbag. |
| IN ANCIENT Sparta, the citizens were stoical, military-minded and noted for their economy of speech. Legend has it that when Philip of Macedonia was storming the gates of Sparta he sent a message to the besieged king saying, “If we capture your city we will burn it to the ground. A one-word answer came back: “If.” |
| In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat; but is the evolution of real knowledge. It marks the first step towards victory. This is one great reason for utmost tolerance of variety of opinion. A clash of doctrines is an opportunity-not a disaster. |
| IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY , Cellist , Gregor Piatigorsky writes about a time he was soloist at a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini: “The maestro paced the dressing room in which I practised, repeating. ‘You are no good; I am no good.’“ ‘Please, maestro,’ I begged. ‘I will be a complete wreck.’ Then, as we walked onstage, he said, ‘We are no good, but the others are worse. Come on, caro, let’s go.’ ” |
| IN HIS youth, impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir studied for a while with Gleyre, a classicist master who advocated the antique style. When Gleyre first saw Renoir’s work, he remarked dryly, “There is no doubt that you paint simply to amuse yourself.”Renoir’s reply: “I want you to know that when I cease to be amused, I will no longer paint.”Lives of famous Painters |
| IN ITALY , FRANCE AND SPAIN the churches are always open on week-days and never empty. One sees a peasant woman, kneeling at an altar while her children wander happily about the aisles—and men and women, young and old, sitting or strolling here and there as though they were at home. They do not go there as an observance. Some have come in to rest and some to think and some to pray. They seek the peace and dusk and silence and perhaps ‘the beauty of a church in which to recharge their spiritual batteries—and their presence proves that it fulfils this need. Most of our churches between Sundays are deserted and some of them are even locked. We might gain much by using them as sanctuaries on week-days for a few minutes of peace, prayer or reflection and they might mean more to us on Sundays if we did So. |
| IN MOODS of doubt and frustration in the face of injustice and wretchedness, I think of the counsel of the most sagacious man I have ever known, Judge ‘Justice Brandeis of the American Supreme Court. “My Dear.” he once advised his impatient daughter, “if you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.” -Paul Freund |
| IN MY psychiatric practice, people sometimes ask me what psychiatry is all about. To me, the answer is increasingly clear. Almost every emotional problem can be summed up in one particular bit of behaviour: it’s a person walking about screaming, “For God’s sake, love me.” Love me, that’s all. He goes through a million different manipulations to get somebody to love him. On the other hand, healthy people are those who walk about looking for someone to love. And, if you see changes in the people who are screaming, “Love me, love me,” it’s when they realize that if they give up this screaming and go to the other business of loving another human, they can get the love they’ve been screaming for all their lives. It’s hard to learn, but it’s good when you learn it. —Dr Thomas Malone |
| IN NORTH America the Navaho Indians combine work and play by turning the job of branding cattle and breaking horses into a twoday social event, much as the early white settlers did. In actual practice, compare the real enjoyment of women sitting around a quilting frame, pricking the skin on their index fingers with every stitch,talking as fast as the needles weave in and out; and the real enjoyment of idle men and women standing around a livingroom, sipping cocktails, trying to think what to say next. Some of today’s famous partygivers might do well to learn the lesson that a little work can provide an unrivalled hook to hang a party on. |
| IN ONE of his last interviews before he died, Carl Sandburg was asked whether there were any bad words. He replied that he was aware of only one: “Exclusive.” Belonging to exclusive clubs, living in exclusive communities. To be exclusive, he emphasized, is to feel superior and therefore to regard others as unworthy of one’s association and friendship. |
| IN THE EARLY DAYS , when fabrics were dyed a home, it was not easy to get a fast color. A few washings, and most the dye would come out into the water. A good Quaker used an analogy based on the problem to instruct his children. It was the task of parents, he said, to take time with the fabric and dye of their chariacters to fit them for the responsibilities of life. One daughter, after the old man had passed away, came upon the record of birth and this quaintly worded petition which her father had added : ” And fit her for her long journey, O Lord, with virtues that will wash. |
| IN THE INTRODUCTION to The Big Knockover by Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman wrote:Hammett bought himself an expensive crossbow at a time when it meant giving up other things to have it. It had just arrived and he was testing it, fiddling with it, liking it very much, when friends arrived with their ten year old boy. Dashiell and the boy spent the afternoon with the crossbow, and the child’s face was pathetic when he had to leave it. Hammett opened the back door of the car, put in the crossbow, went hurriedly into the house, refusing all cries of “No, no!” and such.When our friends had gone, I said, “Was that necessary? You wanted it so much.”Hammett said, “The youngster wanted it more. Things belong to people who want them most.” |
| IN THE past, societies with a vivid conception of the life beyond were indifferent to prognostication, divination and prophecy. In Europe, for example, astrology came into prominence during the Renaissance when millennial Clristianity lost its hold on the educated. |
| IN THOSE vernal seasons of the year, vhen the air is calm and pleasant, It were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out, and See her riches and partake in her Rejoicing with heaven and earth. —John Milton |
| Intellectual man possibly has become too much of an explaining creature. Villains without motives, however, can still excite us in Shakespeare, on Broadway, or in fairy tales. When St. George slays the dragon, who wants to hear the beast explain with his dy-ing puffs of fire, “It wasn’t really my fault. I’m maladjusted. My mother ran off with a sea monster.” I believe we need frequent vacations from explanations. |
| ISAAC ASIMOV , on the power of fatherly advice: My father once looked through one of my information crammed books and asked, “How did you learn all this, lsaac?“ “From you, Papa.” “From me? l don’t know any or this.” “You didn’t have to, Papa. You valued learning and you t:aught to value it. All the rest came without trouble. |
| ISAAC NEWTON, displaying the humility of greatness: I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smooth pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. – Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton |
| ISN’T IT FUNNY, when the other fellow takes a long time to do something, he’s slow. When I take a long time to do something, I’m thorough.When the other fellow doesn’t doit, he’s lazy. When I don’t do it, I’m busy. When the other fellow does it without being told, he’s overstepping his bounds. When I go ahead and do it without being told, that’s initiative. When the other fellow states his opinion strongly he’s bullheaded. When I state opinion strongly, I’m firm. ‘the other fellow overlooks ‘ rules of etiquette, he’s rude. I skip a few rules of etiquette I’m doing my own thing. |
| IT HAS A salutary, humbling effect to reflect that, far from being a numerous tribe, we are one of the sparsest and most negligible species on the face of the globe. Actually, ours is not the Age of Man—in fact it is not an Age of Mammals at all, but an Age of Insects. Thus far the entomologists have recorded some 700,000 varieties of them, and there are probably four times as many which have not yet been discovered and catalogued. The number of individual insects is so vast that there are no figures to express it. On a summer day the crickets and gnats and ladybirds in the small copse on the hill easily outnumber the human inhabitants of an entire continent. If we vanished from the earth, the teeming life of the planet would hardly remark our going. |
| IT HAS BEEN OFTEN said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance and suspicion are the fruits of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. Our healing gift to the weak is the capacity for self-help. We must learn how to impart to them the technical, social and political skills which will enable them to get bread, human dignity, freedom and strength by their own efforts. —Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal al Change (Harper & Row) |
| IT IS A curious thing, this craving for solitude that we all seem to have. Gregarious by instinct though we are, even in early childhood we hunger to be alone. Who has not known the child’s passion to become inaccessible—the secret cave made out of a blanket thrown over upturned chairs, the house in the tree to which one climbed and pulled up the rope ladder? —Raymond Fosdick |
| IT IS A PARADOX that just when technology has made it possible for parents to spend more of their time than ever before in training their children, they should foist so much of the responsibility upon the schools. |
| IT IS A WEAKNESS of the scientific view that if you know how a thing works mechanically then you know everything worth knowing about it. But a knowledge of the acoustic properties of catgut, reeds and brass tubing does not explain Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. —J. B. Priestley |
| It is advantageous to an artist that his work should be attacked as well as praised.Fame is a shuttlecock.If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground.To keep it up , it must be struck at both ends. |
| IT IS INTERESTING to note that, according to the Jewish calendar, the day begins at sunset, not at sunrise. All festivals and holy days begin at night. The Sabbath begins at sunset. According to the Jewish tradition,. this is of moral significance. It is not difficult to have confidence in the day and to believe in the existence of light and sunrise. The Jewish day begins at night to symbolize the faith, even in darkness, that light will prevail and that a new morrow will dawn upon mankind. -William Silverman in Rabbinic Wisdom and Jewish Values |
| IT IS no new observation that in America a great premium is placed upon youth. Men and women are often congratulated upon their youthfulness when they should be commiserated with for their immaturity. —Ashley Montagu |
| It is not at all suitable for people of great quality to be very learned, but highly necessary for them to know the world and be able to deal with people, and they can’t learn that from books ,but only from experience. Liselotte in “Letters” |
| It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a man in difficulty-the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse-the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. |
| It is not the incompetent who destroy an Organization. They simply never get into a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest on their achievements, who are forever clogging things up. To keep an Industry pure, you’ve got to keep it in perpetual ferment.Henry Ford. |
| IT IS on the surface of the ground where most life lives , that the child has his natural being..And it is the sharp enjoyment I then experienced – a kind of “cheekbyjowl ‘ brotherhood with every insect , vegetable , matchstick and raindrop in the neighborhood that I recall most vividly today .And sometimes I cant help wondering whether three feet two inches would be the ideal height for mankind. It seems somehow the proper scale |
| IT IS POINTLESS to complain that crime and sin receive more publicity than exemplary behaviour. It is, on the contrary, a matter of some satisfaction that evil is still regarded as news. It will be a sad day if integrity and goodness become so rare as to be featured in the papers. – |
| IT IS POSSIBLE to listen to silence, as well as to sound, just as it is possible to see both light and shadow. The quality of silence is its heaviness and its brooding, its sense of infinity. When your car has become accustomed to this, you are aware of slight noises which, rather than relieving the silence, deepen it. Like the sound of the night breeze—a kind of gentle respiration, as if it were the breath of the world, very soothing to the mind. —Leonard Wibberky in Yesterday’s Land |
| It is something to be able to paint a particular picture ,or to carve a statue ,and so to make a few objects beautiful ;But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.To affect the quality of the day -that is the highest of the arts. Thoreau |
| It is The feeling of exerting effort that exhilarates us, as grasshopper is exhilarated by jumping. A hard job, full of impediments, is thus more satisfying than an easy job. |
| IT is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, — in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather. Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grand-fathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists — or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing. G.K.Chesterton |
| IT MAY seem odd to hear a doctor speak ut such things as love and courage; in terms of stress. these are two of most protective qualities to culti-While it’s true that the abilities to love and to be brave are formed early in life. it is also true that sometimes. simply by acting, the appropriate emotion will follow. If we are generous and kind towards others, we usually find that we begin to feel good towards them. If we behave with courage. even when we are inwardly afraid, we often feel braver for having acted that way. This is not altruism—this is medical advice. -Dr JOhn Prutting |
| It might be a good idea If the various countries of the World would occasionally swap history books, Just to see What other People are doing with the same set of facts. |
| IT SEEMS to me that the phrase “dead silence” is a mistaken figure of speech, because silence is alive. Things leap to your mind out of silence. It’s as if all your senses were on tiptoe, and there is a faint ringing in your ears which could be your memory tuning up, huniniing like a tight —Edmund Ware Smith. |
| IT SEEMS to be a characteristic of all great work that its creators wear a cloak of imprecision. Einstein was generally regarded as a vague, impractical man. Many scientists still think this. Yet the truth is that Einstein’s calculations had a level of precision and an exactness of thought which those who accuse him of being impractical are themselves quite incapable of attaining. The girl that Mozart wanted to marry said after his death that she had turned him down because she thought he was a scatterbrain, and would never make good., Wordsworth had matters right when he spoke of Newton — “the index of his mind, voyaging strange seas of thought, alone.”The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing everything, who is always with it, that we should beware of it will not be very long now before his behaviour can be imitated quite perfectly by a computer. |
| IT WAS 1952 or 1953,” recalls actor Karl Malden, “when John Steinbeck had an office next to mine at 20th CenturyFox. Every day he would come in at about 8.15 a.m., with a fresh yellow writing pad and a jug of 80 pencils, and you could hear a bzzz bzzz while he sharpened all 80 pencils. Then, after half an hour. he would read me what he had written, which had nothing to do with the story he was supposed to be writing, but seas about the ride to work, a description the office. anything. I’d say, ‘What are you writing this for?” And he’d explain, ‘Karl, I have to warm up.’ What a fool I was. If I had just picked up those notes, I could make a fortune publishing than today as John Steinbecks Warmups.” |
| IT WOULD BE well for all of us to remember that suspicion is far more apt to be wrong than right, and unfair and unjust than fair. It is a first cousin to prejudice and persecution and an unhealthy weed that grows with them. |
| ITALIAN WOMEN look like women than any other women. They eat heartily and scorn contrived thinness They do not tie down their more salient anatomical features with a lot of whalebone and harness. They bounce pleasantly They wiggle pleasantly .And they walk slowly. For they are in no hurry and they wish to give as much pleasure to the viewer as possible .They are largely content to be women and let the men run the business . |
| It’s the present moment that matters. the past and the future are only a succession of present moments, but we are always tempted to exaggerate their importance because they are One or because they have not yet come. |
| JACK LEMMON relates that before he played the part of the song and dance man in a US TV film version of John Osborne’s play, The Entertainer , he discussed the role with Sir Laurence Olivier, who played the part in the original production. Lemmon expressed admiration for Sir Laurence’s portrayal of the performer who “isn’t great, isn’t terrible, isn’t mediocre.” All those qualities are playable. This character is almost good enough which is a terribly difficult thing for an actor to capture.”I asked Olivier how he did it, and he said very quietly. ‘My dear boy. I went out there every night and did the best I possibly could |
| JAMES ALEXANDER THOM, on flattery: The philosopher Diogenes was washing lentils to make soup. He was noticed by the philosopher Aristippus, who had acquired a comfortable living by paying court to the king. Aristippus sneered, “If you would only learn to flatter the king, you would not have to live on such poor food as lentils.” “If you had learnt to live on such food as lentils,” retorted Diogenes just as disdainfully, “you would nor have to flatter the king.” |
| JAMES BOSSARD , late professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania : Modern patterns of courtship do not make for wise choices of matrimonial partners. The current premium is upon success in party-going, dancing, sports, petting and use of a patois which in my day was called “a good line.” There is an impersonality about present-day adolescent courtship similar to what one finds in adult aspects of social life. We go to a cocktail party or reception, observe all the niceties, say the acceptable things and, by avoiding any controversial subject, create the impression of being “nice,” “adaptable,” and having a “pleasant personality.” This involves a kind of social manoeuvring, little of which touches upon or reveals th6se qualities which matter so much if the couple are to live happily together for the next 40 or more years. When one thinks in terms of a lifelong union, being a good mixer and having a presentable pair of legs are somewhat less important than what one thinks about God, money and a crying baby. |
| JAMES ‘CORBETT, champion prize-fighter, on winning: – When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to .the centre of the ring, fight. one more round. When your arms are St> tired that you can hardly lift your guard, fight one more- round_ When you wish your opponent would put you to sleep, fight one more round. The man Who fights one more round is never whipped. -. |
| James Harvey Robinson in The Mind in the Making: One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase, “getting something for nothing,” as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed to us gratis. Who can flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic and moral conviction or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing. |
| JAMES HUMES , on snatching victory from the jaws of defeat : When Nathaniel Hawthorne was dismissed from his government job in the cuStom-house in 1849, he went home in despair. His wife listened to his tale of woe, set pen and ink on the table, lit the fire, put her arms around his shoulders and said, “Now you will he able to write your novel.” Hawthorne did, and literature was enriched with The Scarlet Letter. -speaker’s Treasury of Avadore Alma, the Famous |
| JAMES RESTON, former vice-president of The New York Times, on news that’s fit to print: I have occasionally flirted with the idea that every responsible newspaper should have one competent editor in charge of nothing but good news. I am not talking about silly Pollyanna drivel, but about hard, factual news about the accomplishments and decencies of our people, which all too often get buried under the daily torrent of gloom. _The Quill |
| JAMES STEPHENS : If someone asks what it is that makes a good talker, I’d answer very simply that a good listener makes a good talker. And what then is a good listener? A good listener is one who’ likes the person who is talking. This listening with affection is creative listening. No person, however gifted, is talking at his best unless he likes the people he is talking to, and knows that they like him; then he is inspired, almost as the poet is. |
| JAMES THURBER : My pet antipathy is the bright detergent voice of the average singer, male and female, yelling or crooning in cheap yammer songs of the day about “love.” We are brought up without being able to tell love from sex, lust, Snow White or Ever After. We think it is a push-button solution, or instant cure for discontent and a sure road to happiness, whatever it is. By our sentimental ignorance we encourage marriage as a kind of tranquillizing drug. A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.” |
| JAMES THURBER: “Almost everybody starts out by trying to sell other people’s words to magazines as his own, and you will have to go through this phase. . . . Years ago a guy like you asked a number of writers what was the loveliest word in the language and Ring Lardner came up with ‘mange.’ “ |
| JAMIL BAROODY , the late Arabian ambassador to the United Nations, once offered a few propsals which he conceded might be on how to end war: Men under 35 should be exempted from military service, and warriors must be at least 40. And if that does not work, then wars can be started only with the consent of mothers. — J.P. |
| JESSAMYN WEST in To See the Dream: Being loved is something that happens to someone else. tLoving is what happens to you. Without it and the desire that always goes with it to make gifts of love, life is maimed, mutilated, deprived, depraved. With it, anything can be borne. To live without being loved is sorrowful. Without loving here is no real life. – |
| JESSAMYN WEST in To See the Dream: If I were to join a circle of any kind it would be a circle that required its members to try something new at least nce a month. The new thing couldse. very inconsequential: steak for breakfast, frog hunting, walking on stilts, memorizing a stanza of poetry. It could be staying up outdoors all night, making up a dance and dancing it. speaking to a stranger, reading the Bible—anything not ordinarily done. —Hodder & Stoughton |
| JOHN CIARDI : Literature is one of the central continuing experiences of the race. It is no cultural ornament. Through literature, the voices of mankind’s most searching imaginations remain alive to all time. One needs to hear Joe lift his question into the wind; it is, after all, every man’s question at some time. One needs to stand by Oedipus and to hold the knife of his own most terrible resolution. One needs to come out of his own Hell with Dante and to hear that voice of joy hailing the sight of his own stars returned to. No man is even halfcivilized until those voices have sounded within him. A savage, after all, is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race. Literature is one most fundamental part of that news. |
| JOHN EISENHOWER , writing of himself and his famous father, General Dwight Eisenhower, recounts:In spite of deep mutual affection,there existed a certain military wall between us. I was not only his son; I was a young lieutenant who needed on occasions to be straightened out. On practically the first evening I arrived in London, for example, as Dad and l were walking down the street, I asked him in all earnestness:“If we should meet an officer who ranks above me but below you, how do we handle this? Should I salute first, and when he returns my salute, do you return his ?”The question was legitimate to my mind and has never been answered completely to my satisfaction. Dad, however, exclaimed, “John, there isn’t an officer in this theatre of war who doesn’t rank above you and below me “ |
| JOHN KEASLER, on the “tightrope” nature of humour: Imagine this scene. A formal, stodgy affair is being held in an elegant ballroom. The orchestra puts forth measured music, and people dance slowly, correctly. Suddenly a man is seen standing on a balcony above, glaring down; a pompous, heavy-set figure who gives off vibeations of disapproval, disdain, and a certain fearsome, if overdone, dignity. The music falters and fades out. The dancers stop. Arrogantly, the man starts to descend the beautiful, curving staircase. At the first step he slips and falls. A snicker or two is heard, quickly controlled. He keeps falling, clumpety-clump. More muffled laughter, for he is doing one of the world’s greatest pratfalls. Now, somersaulting down, he careens off the wall at the second landing and keeps falling. People roar. He reaches the bottom of the stair-case—the crowd is howling with mirth—and slides out on the polished floor. He is dead. When you figure out at exactly what step of the staircase it stopped being funny, you will know what humour is. |
| JOHN KENNETH GALLBRAITH author and former U.S. Ambassador to India, is, at six foot eight, an enormous figure who tends to dominate every group with a combination of size, intellect, humour and sheer gall. He revels in his height : “It greatly enlarges your options in life. You are twice as visible, and when people think of someone to write a paper or do a job, they are much more likely to remember you. I have gone through life with the comforting belief that everyone else is abnormally short.” |
| JOHN ROBERT CLARKE : There is a story that when Sarah Bernhardt in her later years lived in an apartment high over Paris an old admirer climbed all the stairs and asked her breathlessly, “Why do you live so high up?” “Dear friend,” she replied, “it is the only way I can still snake the hearts of men beat faster.” As many people were drawn to Sarah Bernhardt, so are we drawn to all those who can extract amusement from their own plights and predicaments in life and whose enjoyment of us does not seem to depend on impressing us. They have a secret source of strength that we cannot create or destroy. Jacques Barzun in We Who Teach.: |
| John Ruskin: There is hardly anything in the world that some man can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey, |
| JOHN STEINBECK in East of Eden: believe that there is one story in the world and only one. Human beings are caught—in their lives, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too—in a net of good and evil. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question : Was. it good or was it evil? Have I done well, or ill? — |
| JOHN STEINBECK on the hairdresser: ‘It is my considered opinion that he is the most influential man in any community. When women, go to a hairdresser, something happens to them. They feel safe, they relax. The hairdresser knows what, their skin is like under the makeup; he knows their age; they don’t have to keep up any kind of pretence. Women tell a hair dresser things they wouldn’t dare confess to a priest, and they are open about matters they’d try to conceal from a doctor. When women place their secret lives in the hairdresser’s hands, he gains an authority few other men ever attain. I have heard hairdressers quoted. with complete conviction on art, literature, politics, economics, child care and morals. I tell you that a clever, thoughtful, ambitious hair dresser wields a power beyond the comprehension of most men |
| JOHN STEINBECKin East of Eden: Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. — |
| JOSE FIGUERES FERRER, President of Costa Rica: A lesson I learnt as a boy about economic and sociological sophism came from an Italian novel. The farm workers of the fertile Po Valley discovered that they could earn more begging in city streets than in cultivating the earth. So they abandoned the fields. Inevitably a shortage of wheat followed, creating a scarcity of bread. The price of bread rose until only the privileged few could afford it. Those who had deserted the fields to beg began to riot. Within a short time they had destroyed all the bakeries. Yet in spite of this energetic approach, the bread still did not appear. |
| JOSEPH HAYDN, on being criticized for the gaiety of his church music, replied: I cannot help it. I give forth what is in me. When I think of the Divine being, my heart is so full of joy that the notes fly off as from a spindle. And I have a cheerful heart, He will pardon me if I serve Him cheerfully. —Catherine Drinker Bowen, Biography: The Craft and the Calling |
| JOSEPH WOOD CRUTCH : How long will it be before there is no quietness anywhere, no escape from the rumble and the crash, the clank and the screech which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of technology? Whatever man does or produces, noise seems to be an unavoidable by-product. Perhaps he can, as he now tends to believe, do anything. But he cannot do it quietly. |
| JOSEPHINE LOWMAN , on marriage: Building a good marriage and building a good log fire are similar in many ways. You build a fire with paper and kindling, and all at once it goes up in a brilliantly burning blaze. Then the primary blaze burns down and you wonder if the fire will fizzle out and leave you in the dark. You blow on it and fan it For all you are worth. Sometimes smoke billows out and almost chokes you, but if the materials are good and if you invest enough energy and interest in maintaining it, soon the big solid logs catch, and your fire lakes on new qualities. |
| JOYCE BROTHERS, American psycho on mirror reflections: There is a fascinating difference between the way men and women see themselves in a mirror. When a man looks in the glass, he sees not a ghastly ungroomed creature. Only on his most despondent days will he notice the thinning hair, the spare tyre, the sagging jawline. But a woman—a woman has been trained since she was a little girl to look in the mirror to check what’s wrong. Women are inclined to see their flaws rather than their assets. A woman looks in the mirror and thinks “I need more lipstick” or “I look tired today,” Even the most beautiful woman. |
| JP DONLEAVY, IrishAmerican satirist, on a popular indoor sport : Name dropping is essential in order to let others know whom they might get to know if they get to know you. In order to warm up, bring out your minor names first, slowly increasing their importance till your adversary quakes with the sound of the majors. If you are a big name yourself, you will, of course, be deprived of dropping it, unless you can momentarily pretend you as someone else who knows you personally. — |
| JUST BEFORE the Battle of Dunbar Oliver Cromwell made this plea to his men which deserves to be written over the portals of every church, every school, every courthouse and every legislative body : “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ think that ve may be mistaken.” — |
| JUST UNDERSTAND one thing, and pass it along to everyone at the top who still doesn’t know: that you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. A person from whom you have taken everything is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The First Circle |
| KEEP IT IN Hand There are only two ways to be un-prejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to he completely indifferent. Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided. –Charks Curtis |
| KEEPING a Clear Head . Manual labour to my father was not only good and decent tor its own sake, but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one’s thoughts, a contention which I have since proved on many occasions, To scrub a floor has alleviated many a broken heart and to Wash and iron one’s clothes brought order and clarity to many a perplexed and anxious mind. |
| KNOW NOW has increased by leaps and hounds. “Know why,” “know what,” “know whether or not,” all lag. We might be wise just to call a halt in our search for the power to do on a grander and grander scale, the things we do not know whether or not we should do at all. |
| KNOW YOUR OWN WEAKNESS: It has been my experience that the people with a gift for society—the best friends, the Most humane judges, the wisest statesmenare people who have themselves, to measuring frankly their own Weaknesses, and so learning through much error where their happiness, and hence their usefulness, lies. The man or woman who tries to live up to the public picture or the neighbour’s picture of him is an anxious one. So with nations as with people, they can best negotiate from strength when they know their own weaknesses |
| LACK OF TIME is the supposed great misery of our century. Our sense of that, not a disinterested and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things. It is as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash. —John Fowles.. |
| LAO—TSE (c. 565 B.C.). on leadership: A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done his aim fulfilled they will say: “We did it ourselves.” |
| LAURENS VAN DER POST in Venture to the Interior: I do not understand love of just one place; I believe one mustn’t confuse love of life with the love of certain things in it. One cannot pick the moment and place as one pleases and say, “Enough! This is all I want. This is how it is henceforth to be.” That sort of present betrays past and future. Life is its own journey; presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one’s eternal peril. |
| LAURIE LEE , the English poet and writer, recalling his childhood in a Cotswold. village I shall never forget that three foot high vision of the world—intimate, downtoearth, sharpfocus. Like any child, I lived at the level of grownups’ boots, was somewhat shorter than summer grass, could look cats and beetles full in the face, knew the kneebones of grasshoppers, the eyes of flies, the mouth of a chewing snail. I could even study the moss on a stone and smell the wings of the bees in the bushes. It is on the surface of the ground, where most life lives, that the child has his natural being. And it is the sharp enjoyment I then experienced—a kind of cheekbyjowl brotherhood with every insect, vegetable, ‘matchstick and raindrop in the neighbourhoodthat I recall most vividly today. And sometimes I can’t help wondering whether three feet two inches wouldn’t. be the ideal height for mankind. It seems somehow the proper scale. |
| Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate,never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn-pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why you, can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to beat your opponent at fencing. After that you can start again at Mathematics ,until it is time to learn to plough. |
| LEO AIKMAN, columnist, quoting a man who remembered a 1907 environmental cleanup in New York: Our family of eight had a nice plot with a vegetable garden bordered by lilac bushes. A tenement behind us was populated by people who used to throw their trash—old shoes and socks, an assortment of things—into our garden. My older brothers and I thought that these people—they weren’t called polluters then—should be told off. Mother, who had never got beyond primary school in the Old Country, and who had never heard of “psychology” told us to go out and pick lilacs. Then, she directed us to give each of the dozen families a bouquet, and say our mother thought they might enjoy them. Somehow a miracle happened. No more pollution. – A.C. |
| LEO ROSTEN : `Don’t count your chickens it they’re hatched.” Anyone who counts chickens before they’re hatched is counting eggs, not chickens. Pay no attention to a dolt like that. |
| LEO ROSTEN : Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Not necessarily. Absence can liberate the brain from the heart’s maudlin seductions. And if absence makes the heart grow fonder, what shall we do about “Out of sight, out of mind”? |
| LEO ROSTEN : All power to the people! The people who shout “All Power to the people” want power to be handed over to the people who shout “All power to the people |
| LEO ROSTEN : Money can’t buy happiness. Nothing brings happiness to some people: anything brings happiness to others. By and large, money brings more happiness than the absence thereof. |
| LEO ROSTEN, retelling a rabbinical tale about stealing “What most encourages theft?” asked a teacher: “Hunger,” replied one pupil. “Envy,” said another. Extravagance,” said a third. But a fourth student answered best : “Those who buy stolen goods.” – |
| LEO SLIZARD , a brilliant nuclear physicist was a figure of impressive intellect, and also of wit. He once astounded a high ranking British official whom he met at a dinner by blandly outlining a highly secret strategic policy. Slizard had simply taken a few well known facts and deduced the policy from them. And he delighted Kruschev when they met in 1960 by presenting with an injector razor and saying, “This is a small present. It is very good and I like it very much ” Then he smiled and added,“lf there is no war, I will send you the blades |
| LEONARD BERNSTEIN was asked if he wasn’t weary of the phrase, “pianistcomposerconductor,” by which he is frequently described. “Actually, it’s a most useful designation,” said Bernstein. “Suppose one night I conduct a performance that is not considered really fine; people will think that for a pianist it was not a bad effort. Or, if I should do a piano solo that’s not topstandard, they’ll think that for a composer he doesn’t play badly.” |
| LEONARD BERNSTEIN, says an associate, always wants to try everything.” At an airport. a photographer once asked the noted conductor to pose amide a motorcycle. Bernstein refused.”That would be phoney.” he objected. “I don’t ride a motorcycle…The photographer assured him that he could if he tried. He showed him how the controls worked. Bernstein was interested. In a few moments, to the consternation of horrified Philharmonic officials, be was off at top speed .Then he coaxed a Philharmonic player on to the pillion and made another turn about the airfield.”Now you can take the picture . I am a motorcycle rider” |
| LESLIE WEATHERHEAD, on friendship: When a soldier was. injured and could not get back to safety, his buddy went out to get him, against his officer’s orders. He returned mortally wounded, and his friend, whom he had carried back was dead. The officer was angry. “1 tokl you not to go,” he said. “Now I’ve lost both of you. It was not worth it.” The dying man replied, “But it was, sir, because when I got to him the said, `Jim, I knew you’d come.'” |
| LET us not say to ourselves that we reed the dog as a protection for our house. We do need him—but not only as a watchdog. I have often stood in need of my dog’s company, and I have derived, from the mere fact of his existence, a great sense of inward security. In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs some-thing to tell him that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the four feet trotting behind. —Konrad Lorenz in King Solomon’s !Zing |
| LEUITENANT ROBERT COTE is the head of the Montreal police technical section, otherwise known as the “bomb squad.” Cote has personally dismantled about too bombs planted by terrorists. The bombs have ranged in size from 250 grammes to jo kilograms of dynamite, and he risks his life with each new one. Recently I offered him a cigarette. Cote scowled slightly. “No, thanks,” he said. “That’s too dangerous for me.” —David :MacDonald |
| Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life.This results not merely from life’s imitative instinct ,but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression ,and that Art offers certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. |
| Life is a card game in which everyone is dealt a hand which he must accept. His success will depend on his playing as well as it can be played. A very large number of failures in life occur because men refuse to do this and instead insist on playing the hand they think they should have been dealt. |
| Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling, hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot. Every inch of the way is disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of experience. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till evening.Florence Nightingale. |
| LIFE Is like a game of chess, in which :here are an infinite number of cornplex moves possible. The choice is open, but the move contains within itself all future moves.. One is free to choose, but what follows is the result of one’s choice.From the consequences of one’s action there is never any escape. —Shelley Smith, The Ballad of the Running Man (Harnish Hamilton, London) |
| Life is no brief candle for me .It is a sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment.And I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations G.Bernard Shaw |
| LIFE’S FINEST DAYS,FOR US POOR HUMAN BEINGS ,FLY FIRST.Seneca in Letters from a stoic:The wine which is poured out first is the purest wine in the bottle, the heaviest particles and any cloudiness settling to the bottom. It is just the same with human life. The best comes first. Are we going to let others drain it so as to keep the dregs for ourselves? Let that sentence stick in your mind, accepted as unquestioningly as if it had been uttered by an Oracle: |
| LIGHT IS A magic element. The great builders of the past used it masterfully to manipulate mood. The Egyptians cut the temple at Deir el Bahri from the rocks on the west bank of the Nile so the morning sun would stain it an awesome, purplish-bloody red. The Byzantine architects covered their domes with glistening mosaics, so that light would reflect dizzyingly and dazzlingly, obscuring form with mystery. The Gothic builders filtered light through coloured glass, to set it dappling and dancing on the grey stone. And the baroque masters, in their churches, focused the sun like a spotlight, to heighten the drama of their designs, and, in their palaces, let it in against a wall of mirrors, to flood the room with brilliance. |
| LIKE MOST FAMOUS singers and musicians, GalliCurci was besieged by aspiring young musicians for her encouragement and help. Once, after a concert, she opened her dressing room door to a trembling awestruck young girl who clutched a pitifully small handful of roses. Always gracious, GalliCurci invited the admirer into the flowerbanked dressing room and asked, “Do you sing, my dear?”“Oh, no!” gasped the girl. Galli~Curci motioned to the piano.“Well, then, do you play?”“Heavens, no!” exclaimed the girl.“I just listen.”At that GalliCurci embraced the astonished girl and, taking the tiny bunch of roses, placed them in a vase on her dressing table. “I had forgotten,”she said happily,“that there were people left who only listen.” |
| Listen carefully to the first criticisms of your work.Note just what it is about your work that critics dont like- and then cultivate it.That is the part of your work that is individual and worth cherishing. |
| LOOKING back on my life, few pleasures I have known have excelled digging with a wooden spade in the wet sand near the sea’s edge. Oh, how quivering and trembling a pleasure it was to watch the salt water flow into an estuary that you yourself had prepared for it ! What a commentary it is upon the ways of mortal life that such an ultimate example of useless activity as digging in seasand should be attended with such ravishing transports of happiness ! That incredible sensation when the sea at last really rushes in and our sandbanks grow paler and whiter as the long ripples reach them; till their edges are smoothed away and rounded off and silted into indistinction; and the sand we have piled up comes sliding down, sinking, sinking, sinking; till finally there is nothing left but the smooth seafloor, just as it has been for a thousand years—what can describe the mystery of it? It is a sensation wherein the depths of some profound cosmic consciousness are shared by us. Creation, destruction .. destruction, creation .. . |
| LORD ROTHSCHILD, on risk : There is no such thing as a riskfree society. Even a virtuous life has its risks, as illustrated by a proverb : “The couple who goes to bed early to save candles ends up with twins.” BBC |
| LORD SNOWDON writes of actress Marlene Dietrich, who gave him his first important sitting: She is a great professional. Our Session took place in the afternoon on the empty Cafe de Paris stage. I developed the pictures that night and took them round to her after her ‘performance, at about 3 a.m. She didn’t ‘look at the large print; instead, she examined all my contact prints minutely, without a magnifier. “All right,” she said. “I like the face in this one, but I like the smoke in that one.” “But, Miss Dietrich,” I protested, “these pictures have got to go to press this morning.””Then you’ve got four hours,” she said. “What you do is, you put this one in the enlarger, and you shade this part back with your hand. Okay ? Then you take the negative with the smoke I like, and print that, shading the other bit.”Technically, she was absolutely right. |
| LOTTE LEHMANN, who retired from opera years ago, was celebrating her 69th birthday when a young soprano said to her : “It must be awful for a great singer like you to realize that you’ve lost your voice.” “No,” said the great diva of her day. “What would be awful is if I didn’t realize it.” —Leonard Lyons |
| LOUIS NIZER in Between You and Me :A man who works with his hands is a labourer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; a man who works with his hands and heart is an artist |
| LOVE BY ITS presence, like God by His, makes everything not necessarily clear or right or even good, but acceptable. Whereas in its absence, as in His, there is no hope. Petersen, A Matter of Life and Death (W. H. Allen, London) |
| LOWELL RUSSELL DITZEN: Some people shy away from revealing where they stand because they claim they may hurt someone else’s feelings. True, people can feel a sense of rejection if we too vigorously or violently express our viewpoint and denounce theirs. Yet, it has been my observation that if sensitivity and consideration are present, there is no position that cannot be taken with dignity. And taken or given in. that spirit, any stand can earn the respect of even. those who may seem most opposed to it. |
| M VISWESWARAYYA , the Dewan of Mysore in preindependence days, had a legendary reputation for integrity. Once, Sir Visvesvarayya had to stay overnight in a remote village that had no electricity. A visitor who came to see him late in the evening, noticed that the Dewan used two sets of candles. After going through some papers, he extinguished one set of candles, lit the other and began reading again. When asked the reason for this, Sir Visvesvarayya replied: “When I am reading official documents, I use candles bought with government money. But for my own work, I use my own candles.” |
| MAKING A NEW friend can be as exciting at 50 as it is at 20. Still, tradition and continuity do possess a special value, and the hackneyed truism that old friends are best is literally true.Some mysterious kind of compound interest is at work in longstanding friendships, enriching each new meeting with a set of unheard—but deeply felt harmonic echoes of the past. Perhaps, because this world is so motile and rootless, a common touchstone from years back becomes a foundation stone that gives life a shape and point and reassures us of some stability in a waste of shifting sands.— |
| MAN AND DOG are an old association, and there’s no chance of divorcing them. Michelangelo’s Pomeranian went with his master to work in the Sistine Chapel, where he always rested on a silken pillow. Richard Wagner’s poodle sat in the orchestra pit. Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was written for George Sand’s dog. A fox terrier called Laurel accompanied Napoleon into exile. Dog’s emotional hold over man defies analysis; suffice it to say that they have a great deal in common. Mark Twain once said, “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a man and a dog.” |
| MAN HAS never willingly relinquished the campfire. He carried it indoors and rekindled its embers, and it be-came the hearth fire : a flame, sister to the flame of love. So much he rescued from the loss of paradise. |
| Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but He hates to stand alone in his opinions. |
| Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is less harm in a well fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party, no nation, no class; In short, no reason for destroying anything it does not want to eat. George Bernard Shaw |
| Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. |
| Man, despite his artistic pretensions ,and his sophistication and many accomplishments ,owes the fact of his existence to a 15 CM layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. |
| MAN’ s LIFE : The life of man seems to me like the flight of a sparrow through the hall wherein you are sitting at supper in the wintertime, a warm fire lighted on the hearth while storms rage without.The sparrow flies in at one door ,tarries for a moment in the light and heat ,and then flying forth through another a door vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it had come.So tarries man for a brief space ,but of what went before or what is to follow we know not. |
| Mankind are very odd creatures: One half censure What they practice, the other half practice What they censure- the rest always say and do as they ought. |
| Mankind might be divided between the multitude who hate to be kept waiting because they get bored and the happy few who rather like it because it gives them time for thought. |
| Manners are like the Zero in arithmetic.When Considered alone , of no great apparent value.But when considered in association with others ,they add significantly. |
| MAN’S earthly task is to realize his created uniqueness. As a rabbi called Zusya put it on his deathbed: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya? ” —Martin Buber |
| MANY OF us take it for granted, when we see weak, neurotic, helpless, drifting or unhappy people, that we have an advantage over them by reason of some special merit in us. But the more deeply sophisticated our culture, the more fully are we aware that it is good fortune in our heredity and environment that makes the difference. It is luck, springing from some encounter, some incredible love affair, some fragment of wisdom in word or writing that has come our way and launched us on a secret road of health and on a stubborn resolution to be happy, which has been so vast a resource to some of us in fortifying our embattled spirits. In our world, we should feel nothing but humble reverence for the mystery of misfortune. —John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture |
| MANY people die, as Oliver Wen-dell Holmes said, with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often, it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out. Tagore wrote, “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.” —Robert Youngs |
| MANY PEOPLE have forgotten today that the daiiy routine of early life has the most subtle, profound, and enduring influence upon the physical, moral, and emotional development of child .An orderly existence creates primarily an unconscious relationship to the silent. procession of the days, seasons. and the music of the spheres. |
| MANY SITUATIONS in life demand that we pay no attention to what the words say. The meaning is often a great deal more intelligent—and intelligible—than the surface sense of the words themselves. —S |
| MANY YEARS AGO Bruce Barton and two partners set up an advertising agency in New York. Hoping at least to break even, they paid themselves very modest salaries and their year-end profit was encouraging–so encouraging that for the first time in his life Barton felt rich. He wondered what he should do to celebrate. For a week he gave the problem solemn thought. Finally he decided that every looming front then on, without daily hesitation, self-incrimination , or visions of what life would be like in the poorhouse. he would use a new razor blade. He says that he still ranks the daily new blade ahead of all the luxuries he has since acquired. — |
| MARGARET CRAVEN : A white man said to Tagoona, the Eskimo: “We are glad you have been ordained as the first priest of your people. Now you can help us with their problems.” Tagoona asked, “But what is a problem?” And the white man said, “Tagoona, if I held you by your heels from .a third-storey window, you would have a problem.” Tagoona considered this long and carefully. Then he said, “I do not think so. If you saved me, all would be well. If you dropped me, nothing Would matter. It is you who would have the problem.” |
| MARGARET CULKIN BANNING: In the devotional classic The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kernpis tells the story of a man who was so filled with anxiety and fear that he could nor bring himself to act. As he wavered back and forth in his uncertainty he thought, Oh, if I only knew, then I should have the courage to persevere. And presently, wrote Thomas, he heard within himself this answer from God : “And if you did know, what would you do? Do now what you would then do, and you shall be very secure. This very practical rule of living destroys worry and apprehension about both big and little things. For example, you cannot he sure that a friend will enjoy visiting you—but you would ask him if you were sure. Very well, then —invite him as if you were sure! Or, you can’t be sure you will succeed in a job even if you put in extra work, but how can you satisfy your-self without proceeding as if you did know you would succeed? The result may not always be what you hope for, but the sense that you have done the, best you can to make things work out, and have given opportunity itself a chance, does produce in yourself that inner peace which is the best kind of security. |
| MARGARET LEE RUNBECK : Children are wholesomely objective about their own faults. To begin with, they don’t consider faults permanent so they aren’t particularly embarrassed about them. A chubby child I know came home from school and said without chagrin, “No matter if I give other children my piece of cake, they’d rather not eat their lunch with me.” “Why do you suppose that is?” her mother asked, as tactfully casual as possible. “Well, I suppose they think I’m bossy,” the little girl said. “And are you?” “Yes,” she said cheerfully. “I suppose I’ll have to get over it. You can’t boss people around if they won’t play with you.” If adults had the same expectation about reforming themselves, the race might really get somewhere ! |
| MARGARET LEE RUNBECK : The two boys, nine and seven, built he toy cart themselves. And when the art was almost ready to be shown to he family, Mike said, “Which do you kink will be more fun? Makin’ or Havin’?” Bill sat back amid the sawdust, and thought about it. “Makin’,” he said. People go to lectures and read books. they discuss and argue. And then, unannounced and unheralded, casual as a petal from the tree, a child says the sum quite simply. They don’t need. to explain it. They’ve found it out by doing. “Making” must come from within, while “having” is an external circumstance which may or may not be worth is weight in satisfaction. The happiest people of the earth are those who earn that difference early. |
| MARJORE HOLMES , on calendars: In broad flat envelopes, or tightly rolled in cardboard cylinders, they make their bright, bustling appearance before the old year is laid to rest. And as the old one in the kitchen, fingerprinted and jellystained, comes down, you gaze upon the new one, so clean, so unmarked. What record will be written there before another year has passed? For the calendar that hangs in the kitchen is far more than a sheaf of dates. A family’s history, it is a record of life itself. |
| MARK SOIFER : No matter how often I level this weed, It returns after rain As if there is need To remind men who sever Life’s delicate string That destruction is never A permanent thing. |
| MARK TWAIN : Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. |
| MARK TWAIN : Life does not consist mainly even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head. |
| MARK TWAIN : Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug, push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at ,a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. |
| Mark Twain: One should be carefull to get out of an experience only the widsom that is in it, and stop there, lest we be like the car that sits down on the hot stove cover. She will never sit down on a hot stove cover again, and that’s well ; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. |
| MARRIAGE resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot’ be separated; often moving in opposite d’prections, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them. |
| Martha Washington, in a letter written when she was President’s wife : I have learned too much of the vanity of human affairs to expect any felicity from public life. But I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be. For I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. |
| MAURICE GOUDEKET , husband of Colette, the famous French novelist, in Close to Colette: Every man has a tendency to lure a woman away from a past in which he has not shared, and to offer her new skies like a present to welcome her. How many men are never satisfied until they have imposed upon their companion all their own ways of seeing and feeling! They think that by this means they will make sure of their domination over her. But they forget that they will be the first to tire of finding before them only a pale reflection of themselves, of hearing nothing but an echo of their own voices. |
| MAURICE GOUDEKET , husband of Colette, the famous French novelist, in Close to Colette: The red velvet curtains of the window were drawn. Under the lamp Colette read a book of travels, setting off for a terra ignota. I travelled in the past through a history book. The hours slipped by, harmonious and delicious. Silence is a touchstone between couples. It needs very deep feeling before two people in the same room can absorb themselves in work or reading, the presence of the one not only not embarrassing the other but even supporting him, while between one and the other a current of tenderness and trust continues to be obscurely felt. |
| MAX EASTMAN : A simple experiment will distinguish two types of human nature. Gather a throng of people and put them on a ferryboat. By the time the boat has swung into the river you will find that a certain proportion have climbed upstairs in order to be out on deck and see what is, to be seen as they cross over. The rest have settled indoors, to lose themselves in apathy or tobacco smoke. We may divide the passengers on the boat into two classes —those who are interested in crossing the river, and those who are merely interested in getting across. |
| MEN are like pillow-cases. The colour of one may be red, that of another blue, and that of a third black; but all contain the same cotton ,within. So it is with man: one is beautiful, another is black, a third holy, and a fourth wicked: but the Divine Being dwells in them all. |
| MEN BYRN, US Secretary of State , on greatness : I discovered at an early age that Most of the differences between average people and great people can explained in three words —”and then some.” The top people did what was expected of them, and then some. They were considerate and thoughtful others, and then some. They met their obligations and responsibilities fairly and squarely, and then some. They were good friends to their friends, then some. They could be counted in an emergency, and then some. |
| Men can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for years on end. |
| MEN OFTEN REMIND me of pears in their way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at 20, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some that have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, only get their glow and perfume long after frost. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and astringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls. |
| MEN who get on well with women are usually those who know how to get on without them.”If a woman is inquisitive, she must be intelligently inquisitive : in other words, she must learn to ask the sort of questions I can answer.”—Lord Mansroft in Booking the Cooks |
| MEN’S CONCEPT of how women should look is a matter of conditioning. Men like what they are used to and, once accustomed to a deception, they accept it as truth. A new fashion upsets them because it is a reminder that what they have admired is not what it appeared to be. Once the new fashion becomes familiar, however, they forget the one that preceded it. By the time men complain that some new trend is ruining women’s looks, they no longer recall that the look they do not want superseded is as artificial as the look they are attacking. |
| MICHAEL DEBAKEY , heart surgeon : For me. the solitude of early morning is the most precious time of day. There is a quiet serenity that disappears a few hours later with the hustle and bustle of the multitude. Early morning hours symbolize for me a rebirth; the anxieties, frustrations and woes of the preceding day seem to have been washed away during the night. God has granted another day of life, another chance to do something worthwhile for humanity. — |
| MODERATION IS the only virtue. The other so-called virtues are virtuous only in so far as they are joined with moderation. To be overcourageous is to be foolhardy. To be overthrifty is to be parsimonious. To be overloving is to be doting. To be too unselfish is to weary the world with the spectacle of your martyrdom. To give a child, a mate, or a friend too much attention or too little is equally disastrous. Self-abnegation and selfglorification are both vices. To be too thoughtful is to be incapable of action, and to he overactive is selfdefeating. Moderation is What counts. |
| MODERN IDEALISTS are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. |
| MONSIGNOR RONALD KNOX, the Biblical scholar, on life in the universe: John Haldane, a scientist, once suggested to Monsignor Knox that in a universe containing millions of planets it was inevitable that life should appear by chance on one of them. “Sir,” said Knox, “if Scotland Yard found a body in your trunk, would you tell them, ‘There are millions of trunks in the world—surely one of them must contain a body ?’ I think they still would want to know who put it there.” |
| MORAI. SERIOUSNESS does not resolve complex problems; it only impels us to face the problems rather than run away. Clearheadedness does not slay dragons; it only spares us the indignity of fighting paper dragons while the real ones are breathing down our necks. But those are not trivial advantages. |
| Morality has been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit ,as obedience to a law,as inner struggle between opposite laws.As for me,I declare that when I do good I obey no one,I fight no battle and win no victory.The cultivated man has only to follow the delicious incline of his inner impulses.Be Beautiful and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do.That is the whole of Morality. |
| Under our criminal procedure the accused has every advantage. While the prosecution is held rigidly to the charge, the accused need not disclose the barest outline of his defence. He is immune from question or comment on his silence; he cannot be convicted when there is the least fair doubt in the minds of any one of the 52 jurors. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays and defeats the prosecution of crime. |
| MORRIS MANDEL , on noisemakers : When I was growing up there was a teakettle in our house with a lid that did not fit tightly. When steam began to rise, that lid would shake and rattle and make a terrible noise. Of course,the lid was doing no good. In fact, it was allowing the steam to escape; but it made so much noise and impressed you as being very busy and very lmportant.I’ve “always remembered that teakettle, and whenever I see a person who makes a lot of noise without really accornplishing much, I say to myself, “That one” has a loose lid |
| MORTIMER ADLER : In our day, to say that a man, or more frequently a woman, lives morally amounts to saying that he or she is chaste. It is seldom intended to affirm that he or she is courageous, or temperate, or prudent, or just, in most of the affairs of life. These qualities seem to have disappeared from our description of the moral life. Morality. has become largely a matter of obeying the rules in regard to sexual behaviour. |
| MORTIMER J ADLER in How to Read a Book: There is only one situation can think of in which people make an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they. are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the colour of words, the odour of phrases and the weight of sentences. They may take the punctua-tion into account. Then, if never before or after, they read. |
| MOSS HART IN Act One: In the grand design of any successful career the element of luck has been a powerful factor. Perhaps it could more accurately be called a sense of timing. Every successful person I have ever known has had it—actor or businessman, writer or politician. It is that instinct or ability to sense and seize the right moment without wavering or playing safe, and without it many gifted people flicker brilliantly and briefly and then fade into oblivion in spite of their undoubted talents. |
| MOST MEN are “appreciated” into marriage. They meet someone who is not deceived by any obvious shortcomings, but sees right through them to a fellow’s abilities and potentialities. No wonder a man goes for a woman like that. He has something tremendously important in common with her —his private opinion of himself. Of course, she may have a few shortcomings, too, but what are they compared with her unusual understanding, her rare ability to appreciate a person? All men like being appreciated. It props them up in all their leaning places. Soon they find it astonishingly easy to like the person who is doing the appreciating! |
| Most of The disappointments of later life could be lightened immeasurably if we could learn (arid truly believe) early in life that What we confusedly call “happiness” is a direction and not a place. |
| Most of what we learn, we learn from living; and, for the larger part, that means from other people. Nor does it mean only such people as we like. There is a lot to be gained from people we don’t like—what a friend once called “abrasive contacts.” If I may paraphrase an old couplet, “a little friction now and then is useful to the best of men.” To learn to understand people you don’t much care for is like a voyage to a foreign land : it has its inconveniences but it broadens the mind. And in all this, never pretend that you are being noble, or making a sacrifice: you are having a fairly good time |
| MUSIC IS both the commonest and the most mysterious of all the arts. In a sense, apiece of music is like a twosided mirror. On the one side it reflects the composer, his psychological state and the secret nature of his own creative philosophy. On the other side it reflects the listener; what he gets out of a piece of music is directly dependent on what he brings to it. The response of any two people to a composition is bound to be different, simply because there are no two people in the world with identical psychological makeup |
| MY DAUGHTER is not yet three years old. Without her, I would not have seen, lodged in a crack in a pavement, a grain of soot. “What is it?” she asks, crouching down. “Pick it up for me,” she demands. “It’s pretty.” It is the first time l have studied a grain of soot; it is perfectly round, glossy as polished obsidian, beautiful. My children restore to me a part of the world which usually retreats, jus out of reach, in the face of my scurrying. Without my child, I would have missed not only the grain of soot but an opportunity for complete absorption in something other than myself which is a kind of freedom. |
| MY DISTRUST of compulsory National Service goes back to my boyhood days. The school which I attended had representatives of almost every European country, and the parents of most of them had fled to the United States because they wanted to escape the army. `Just when you had your first job in the old country,” said one neighhbur, “and were beginning to make a little money and thinking of getting married, then come the soldiers. They take you away for two years, three years. They boot you around camp, sleep you on hard boards, perhaps shipyou oft to fight in some war you know nothing about. Terrible Now, I confess, I am wavering, and for two reasons. National defence involves learning every detail of the most complicated machines ever devised.If we are to be safe from enemy attack, we must have millions of young men who are masters of these machines. And the enemy must know, in advance, that we do have them . The second reason has been the experience of myself and my colleagues with boys who have left our business for the armed forces and come back when their service was ever. In almost every case they have come back more mature, more ambitious and better able to handle tougher jobs. |
| MY MOTHER , God bless her , taught me when I was little never to carry yesterday on my back. It didn’t matter what had happened—yesterday was dead. I remember her saying: “There’s nothing you can do about it now. If you get in the habit of carrying yesterday around on your back, you’ll be bent double by the time you’re 21 .”— |
| NATIONS ARE renewed from the bottom, not from the top. Everything I know about history, every bit of experience and observation has confirmed me in the conviction that the real wisdom of human life is compounded out of the experiences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality. the fruitage of life comes, like the natural growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the branches to the foliage and the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses of the men who are at the base of everything are the dynamic force that is lifting the levels of society. A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file. |
| NATURALIST William Beebe used to visit Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill. Often, after an evening’s talk,the two men would walk over the spreading lawn and look up into the night sky. They would vie with each other to see who could first identify the pale bit of light mist near the upper lefthand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, and then either Roosevelt or Beebe would recite : “That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andronieda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It is 2,500,00o lightyears away. It consists of one hundred thousand million suns, many larger than our own sun.” Then, after a moment of silence, Theodore Roosevelt would grin and say, “Now, I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.” |
| NEVER be afraid to say what is in your heart and release the spark, for sometimes it becomes a flame at which someone you love, or someone you hardly know, can warm his hands for months to come. Faith Baldwin |
| NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER ]oseph Pulitzer’s advice to writers is applicable to anyone trying to communicate with others. Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they Will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. |
| NEXT TO SELFISHNESS , the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects in the future: |
| NINA FOCH : Heaven knows, women harbour some strange notions, but one of the strangest is the conviction that their brains are like icebergs—only one-eighth should show above the surface. I have never understood why female intelligence should be concealed along with the family scandals, but time and again I’ve seen women pulling in their brains when a man appeared, afraid that the poor thing might scratch his ego on the exposed edges. Having brains and hiding them makes as much sense for a woman as owning a mink coat and keeping it permanently in cold storage. If she Wears them with modesty and tact, not only will she be happier—but her men will, too. |
| NO ONE in his senses would reserve his chief prayers for bedtime—obvi-ously the worst possible hour for any action which needs concentration. My own plan, when hard-pressed, is to seize any time and place, however unsuitable, in preference to the last waking moment. On a day of travelling—with, per-haps, some ghastly meeting at the end of it—I’d rather pray sitting in a crowded train than put it off till midnight when one reaches a hotel bedroom with aching head and dry throat and one’s mind partly in a stupor and partly in a whirl. On other, and slightly less crowded days, a bench in a park, or a back street where one can pace up and down, will do. |
| No man should escape our Universities without knowing how little he knows. He must have some sense of the fact that ,not through his fault, but inherently in the nature of things, he is going to be an ignorant man , and so is everybody else. |
| No Mariner ever enters upon a More uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the twentieth century, Our ancestors knew their way from birth through to eternity; we are puzzled about the day after |
| No MATTER how sophisticated or powerful our thinking machines become. there still will be two kinds of people: those who let the machines do their thinking for them, and those who tell the machines what to think about. |
| NO ONE pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government—except all those other forms which have been tried from time to time. Sir Winston Churchill |
| NO WOMAN, if given a choice of inscriptions for her tombstone, would choose “Mary Jones, a greatly loved woman,” rather than “Mary Jones, a greatly loving woman.” Being loved, as far as Mary Jones is concerned, is someone else’s history. Loving is her history. Loving—and loved—is her triumph. It is something to have had, as they used to say, a good man’s love. But this is as nothing compared with having loved any man, good, bad or indi fferent, The woman who expects to sum up and justify her life to St. Peter by saying, “On earth I was greatly loved,” will encounter’ if I know anything about tears or heaven, heavenly tears at this misunderstanding of life’s purposes and uses. |
| NOTHING angers me more than to hear some critics dismiss millions of people as the great unthinking “Mass,” as though they had no more sense or sensitivity than a school of mackerel. Behind the condescension is the arrogant presumption that the critic’s own tastes, standards and way of life are so much more rewarding , so much more elevated and worthwhile, than those of the man in the street. My own experience has taught me that what matters in man is not intellectual ability but unselfishness, not ideology but human understanding. |
| Nothing is easier than spending The public money. It does no appear to belong to anybody The temptation is overwhelming to bestow It On Somebody |
| NOTICE that the wicked of this world usually hang together even when they hate each other. This is their strength. Good people are scattered, and this is their weakness. |
| NOWADAYS we think of a philanthropist as someone who donates big sums of money, yet the word is derived from two Greek words, philos (loving) and anthropos (man): loving man. All of us are capable of being’ philanthropists. We can give of ourselves. |
| Of all the dear sights in the world, nothing is so beautiful as a child when it is giving something. Any small thing it gives. A child gives the world to you. It opens the world to you as if it were a book you had never been able to read. But when a gift must be found it is always some absurd little thing, pasted on crooked…. An angel looking like a clown.A child has so little that it can give, because it never knows it has given you everything. |
| Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never leave, or lose. To the question o your life, you are the only answer. To the problems of your life, you are the nnly solution. -W.D. |
| Oh , To be only half as wondered as my child thought I was When He was small, and only If as stupid as my teenager who thinks I arm |
| Old men are always advising Young men to save money. That is bad advice. Don’t save Every penny. Invest in Yourself. I never saved anything until I was 40 years old. |
| OLIVER NELSON of Yale Divinity School said twenty five years ago: “If all the dustmen and all the preachers quit at the same time, which would you miss first?” So, let no man lookdown on the work of another. |
| OLIVER St. John Gogarty, who was William Butler Yeats’s doctor in Dublin, told this story about the poet : Yeats as an old man had come back from wintering in Spain for his health. He brought with him a letter from his Spanish doctor, addressed to his Dublin doctor. Gogarty opened the letter and read : “We have here an antique cardiosclerotic of advanced age.” He knew it was a death sentence, so he shoved the letter into his pocket. “No, no,” said Yeats, “it is half my letter. You would not have had it at all were it not for me.” So, very reluctantly, Gogarty produced the letter and read out the fatal words. The old poet rolled one of them over and over on his tongue : “Cardio-sclerotic . . . cardio-sclerotic.” Do you know, Gogarty, said he, “I would rather be called `cardiosclerotic’ than ‘Lord of Lower Egypt !’ ” There you have the poet’s ear for words, the pure delight in the sound of words which enabled him to pick the eye out of death itself. —W. R. Rodgers |
| OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES : Perpetual self-inspection leads to spiritual hypochondria. If a man insists on counting his pulse 20 times a day, on looking at his tongue every hour or two, on taking his temperature morning and evening, he will soon find himself in a doubtful state of bodily health. It is just so with those who are perpetually counting their spiritual pulse, taking the temperature of their feelings, weighing their human and necessarily imperfect characters against the infinite perfections placed in the other scale of the balance. |
| On a Group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men. |
| ON MY first clay at school I discovered that I enjoyed being a New Girl. This feeling has lasted all my life, and on the rare occasions when it leaves me, I know that there must be something seriously wrong. It doesn’t matter whether one is being a New Girl at a school or a party or a public dinner or a railway carriage or a ship; it is fun to infiltrate, to learn the ropes, to find one’s way about among the various social and psychological pitfalls, to size up the other pupils, guests or pas-sengers, and to know that one is being sized up in return. |
| ON NEGATIVE THINKING : When someone is convinced that things can’t be done, he will cling to that conviction in the face of the most obvious contradiction. At the time that Robert Fulton gave the first public demonstration of his steamboat, one of those “can’t be done” fellows stood in the crowd along the shore repeating, “He can’t Start her.”Suddenly there was a belch of steam and the boat began to move. Startled, the man stared for a moment and then began to chant, “He can’t stop her.” |
| ON THE WHOLE , I am inclined to say that after the age of 50 no one should ever allow his blood pressure to be read or, if it is read for a life insurance examination, to be made known to him. The knowledge causes too much unhappiness. Life should be designed for living, for the fullest expression of joy and activity. It is better that it should flame out in the full heat of exuberance than that it should ebb and flow, watched by apprehensive eyes, with the bobbing of a column of mercury. —Dr. Logan Clendening |
| ONCE UPON A TIME we had the good sense to realize that periodic despair is normal, that squabbles between husbands and wives or Parents and children are unavoidable, that not everybody is intended to live in bliss unending. We even had. enough horse sense to realize that anyone who is happy all the time must be mad. For we know that one indication health is precisely the capacity to be unhappy when reality warrants it—to be unhappy without anxiety, apology or defensiveness. |
| ONE BLUSTERY weekend I was strolling with my little boy on the beach. We were scaling shells into the on-shore wind and watching them curve back to us. I don’t know why this was fun. But on that morning scaling shells seemed like the best of all possible things to do. After a while I looked at my watch. It was lunchtime. We left the beach reluctantly. Only after we sat down to eat did I wonder why I had stopped the game. What is so important about noon? Why must we be hypnotized by the clock? My boy and I went back to the beach after lunch, but the mood was gone. The shells and the wind did no-thing for us now but blow sand in our eyes. |
| ONE COLD day a group of porcupines huddled close together for warmth. However, their spines made proximity uncomfortable, so they spread out again and got cold. After shuffling in and out for some time, they eventually found a distance at which they could warm each other fairly well without getting pricked. This distance they henceforth called decency and good manners. —Arthur Schopenhauer |
| ONE DAY a small boy tried to lift a heavy stone, but couldn’t move it. His father, watching, finally said, “Are you sure you’re using all your strength?”“Yes, I am!” the boy cried. “No, you’re not,” said the father.“You haven’t asked me to help you.” |
| One day A wanderer found a piece of clay,So redolent of perfume Its odor scented all the room.“What art thou ?” was the quick demand “Art thou some gem of Samarcand?”Or spikenard rare in rich disguise Or other costly merchandise ?”“Nay I am but a piece of clay .”“Then whence this wondrous sweetness ,pray?”“Friend ,if the secret I disclose I Have been dwelling with a Rose. |
| ONE GOES to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits. For the habit of attention, for the art of expression. For the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts. For the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms. For the art of working out what is possible in a given time. For taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. —William Cory, famous master at Eton |
| ONE HAPPILY married woman described love as “a sense of the other.” It is this fascination with another person and an almost uncanny awareness that are the real material of love. The feelingthat no matter what he does, I know why he does it, and I am interested. I may thoroughly disapprove, I may be exasperated with him for it, but I know why without even thinking about it or possibly being able to explain it. I am absorbed in all his reactions. All of his complexity, all of his contradictions simplyfall into place for me, even if everyone else thinks he is mad. AS Cathy said in Wuthering Heights, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff Not always as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself; but he is always, always in my mind.” This is love in the grand old manner. It is beyond advice columns, beyond the dogged search for happiness. This is what it is all about, —Nora Johnson |
| ONE is daily annoyed by some little corner that needs clearing up, and when by accident one at last is stirred to do the needful, one wonders that one should have stood the annoyance so long when such a little effort would have done away, with it. Moral: When in doubt, do it. —Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| ONE OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN’s great comedy moments was never filmed, according to Robert Florey in La Lantern Magique. Chaplin had asked Douglas Fairbanks to lend him for his next film the castle set used in the film Robin Hood. “What do you intend to do?” asked Fairbanks. Chaplin demonstrated: the draw-bridge was lowered., and Chaplin appeared from inside and walked across it, stretching and yawning. He picked up a bottle of milk, a newspaper and some bread rolls he had previously cached there. Glancing at the newspaper and nibbling on a roll, he sauntered back inside. The drawbridge slowly closed after him. |
| One of the reasons why I don’t see eye to eye with Women’s lib is that women have it all on a plate if only they knew it.They don’t have to be pretty either. |
| ONE OF THE remarkable things about wood is its selfexpression. Whether as the handle of a tool, as a dead stump, or alive in a forest where every branch is a record of the winds that blew, it is always telling something about itself. |
| ONE OF THE running jokes in the days of US President Lyndon ]ohnson’s administration was the President’s diet. Mrs Johnson did everything she could to keep him on it, and he often went to great lengths to indulge himself in his favourite highcalorie treats. One day, at a baseball game, someone in the large party in the President’s box ordered hot dogs and began passing them around. The President was suddenly seen doubled over, his head between his knees, wolfing down a hot dog. Off his diet again, he was afraid that his wife might be watching the game on television and see him eating it. |
| One or The saddest things about envy is Its smallness: The narrow cornpass within which It lives. To be envious is to turn eternally like a caged rat within The tight radius of malice. |
| ONE PICTURE IS worth a thousand words, goes the timeworn maxim. “But one writer tartly said, “it takes words to say that.” We live by words : love, truth, God. We fight for words : freedom, country, fame. We die for words : liberty, glory, honour. They bestow the priceless gift of articulacy on our minds and hearts—from “Mama” to “infinity.” And the men who truly shape our destiny, the giants who teach us, inspire us, lead us to deeds of immortality are those who use words with clarity, grandeur and passion : Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Churchill. |
| ONE WINTER evening, when the innovative engineer Buckminster Fuller was drinking tea by the fireplace of Professor Hugh Kenner, three-year-old Lisa Kenner prolonged her bedtime farewell with the question: “Bucky, why is the fire hot?” Kenner writes: Some instinct told Lisa he was the man to ask. His answer, as he took her on his lap, began, like most of his answers, some distance away from the question. “You remember, darling, when the tree was growing in the sunlight?” On arms like up growing branches, his hands became clusters of leaves as he described their collecting the sunlight, processing its energies into sugars, drawing them down into a stocky trunk. “Then the men cut it down, and sawed it into logs. “And what you see now”—he pointed to the crackling hearth—”is the sunlight, unwinding from the log.” |
| One Wise man has reminded us in any controversy the instant we get angry we have already ceased striving for truth, and have begun striving for ourselves. |
| Only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore It; If You cant ignore It, top It; If You can’t , laugh at It; If You can’t Laugh at It, It’s probably deserved. |
| Only idiots believe everything they hear.Smart people believe only half of what they hear.The smartest among them, know which half to believe |
| ONLY one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning. —Rose Macaulay |
| ONLY ONE THING to Fear My greatest fear has always been that I would be afraid—afraid physically or mentally or morally—and allow myself to be influenced by fear instead of by honest convictions. —Eleanor Roosevelt |
| OSCAR WILDE …….The more we study Art, the less we care for nature .What Art reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design ,her curious crudities,her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.Nature has good intentions ,of course, but as Aristotle once pointed out,she cannot carry them out. |
| OSCAR WILDE…….In Conversation-Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life.This results not merely from life’s imitative instinct ,but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression ,and that Art offers certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. |
| Our generation never had chance. When we were Young they taught us to respect elders, and now that we are old they tell us to listen to Youth |
| OUR MEN are not experts” said Henry Ford. ”We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert. The moment one gets into the expert state of mind a great number of things become impossible. Our new operations are always directed by men who have no previous knowledge of the subject and ,therefore have not had a chance to get on really familiar terms with the impossible. |
| OUR PRESENT ADDICTION to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future.Even when the forecasts prove wrong,we still go on asking for them. We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs just the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken. |
| OUR society is now so organized that we are free to stand on our rights without acknowledging those of others: the right of a bus conductor to deny a passenger information; the right of a typist not to punctuate; the right of a worker not to do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay; the right of a waiter not to wait; the right of a nurse not to smile; the right of a manufacturer to charge more for cheaper products; the right of a wife to demand more than her husband can afford; the right, in all cases, to rake and not to give. But the irony is that these standers-on-rights, these takers, these ungenerous souls will, in the end, be the losers. They cannot, unfortunately, lose their jobs, but they can and do lose respect and affection. They lose an answering smile, a, warm response, a new friend. |
| OURS IS A WORLD of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. — General Omar Bradley |
| OVER THE YEARS , we portrait painters have found that “something wrong with the mouth” is the most common complaint from our subjects. When one painter asks another how his latest portrait is going, the shorthand answer, “Something wrong with the mouth,” tells the whole story. Only too often there is something wrong with the mouth. For the crux of the character lies in the mouth rather than in the eyes. The eyes—the “mirror of the soul,” as the layman thinks—register fleeting emotions, and can be masked. But a mean mouth cannot be made to look a sweet mouth at will. In the mouth there is the physical shape of humour or meanness. for instance. These mobile shapes have been made by the person’s character and cannot be scrubbed out. To read the mouth correctly to begin with, to interpret this in paint, requires not only great skill, but a subtle understanding of the sitter’s personality. |
| PABLO CASALS world’s foremost cellist: You want to know what I think of that abomination, rock ‘n’ roll? I think it is poison put to sound. When I hear it I feel very sad, not only for music but for the people who are addicted to it. America has gone backwards in popular music. The jazz and swing we heard 20 years ago was musically pioneering, interesting and healthy. Rock ‘n’ roll, in . contrast, is against art, against life. It leads away from that exaltation and elevation of spirit that should spring naturally from all good music. But as long as untrained and sometimes untalented entertainers can make themselves and record companies millions of dollars overnight, they will continue to exploit the adolescent’s tendency to choose the tinsel instead of the gold. It’s the parents who will have to take action not in forbidding children to listen to rock ‘n’ roll but by educating them to appreciate better music and by filling their homes with it. |
| PARTING is inevitably painful. It is like an amputation. A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And vet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. It is as if in parting one actually did lose an arm. And then, like the starfish one grows a new one , whole again, complete and round and more whole, even, than before, when the other people had pieces of one. –Anne Morrow Lindbergh, |
| Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success. It is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created. |
| PAUL REESE , who served six years on the UQS. Board of Parole : I believe from the bottom of my heart that there is nothing any of us might not do if circumstances were different. The breaking Point for each of us is different. We differ from the criminals in what wéve done, rather than in what we are. |
| PAUL ROSENFELD said to my wife, after a friend had hurt her, “Go out and do the nicest thing you can think of for someone else. That will restore the balance in the universe.” —Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography |
| PEG BRACKEN, on how haste does not make waste: ‘ There are good reasons For doing some things fast: because life is crowding in hard, and it the thing isn”t done fast it won’t be done at all, or because doing it isn’t halt so rewarding as doing something else. Therefore, iron fast so you can paint slow. Shop Fast so you can sew slow .Cook fast so you can spend some time with a child before it disappears into an adult |
| People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” |
| PEOPLE ARE LIKE stained glass windows; they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within. Elisabeth KilbierRoss, To Live and to Die |
| PEOPLE HAVE been growing old for as long as the human race can remember not quite as old as most of us expect to become, by the grace of God and antibiotics, but old nevertheless. But now there is a widespread feeling that “the aged” have become a class whose welfare should be the responsibility of the bureaucracy. Why has old age become so much more of a problem than it used to be? A doctor has suggested that the tendency to make old age a “problem” is a manifestation of an “underlying ease—family, cultural and social fragmentation and breakdown.” Thus what used to be intimate family problems become matters for the marriage counselor, the psychiatrist, the disciplinary school. Grandfather and grandmother, instead of enjoying an honored position in the home, became a problem for “social” solution. That children, as well as the state, have some responsibility for the care of their elders is generally ignored. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that parents now live so long that they can no longer expect to remain “apart of their younger relatives’ family.” The idea of a statute of limitations on family loyalty is something new. |
| People say, “I got over this,. I got over that.” They are a lot of fools, The People who say You get over Your loves and Your heroes. They never do. |
| PEOPLE WHO are proud of their “energy” usually use it on behalf of their self-assertiveness; they seem unaware that as much energy (and some might say a superior kind) is involved in exercising self-restraint. —Sydney Harris |
| Perfection seems to be nothing more than a complete adaptation to the environment; but the environment is constantly changing. So perfection can never be more than transitory. |
| Perhaps parents would enjoy Their Children more if They stopped to realize that The film of childhood can never he run through for a second showing. |
| PERHAPS the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learnt; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. —Thomas Huxley |
| PERPETUAL JUVENILES ? The very things that Americans adore abroad they destroy systematically at home. Old buildings are broken up in the United States as fast as used packing cases, to make way for new ones. The loss we endure is not merely sentimental. What we lose is our funded experience. Architecture is an art whose masterpieces cannot be stored away like paintings or reproduced centuries later like music. The art lives on in used buildings; they alone can carry it. Without them we are perpetual juveniles, starting over and over again, a people without a memory. |
| PETER FLEMING in My Aunt’s-Rhinoceros and Other Reflections: Of all human experiences physical pain is, as long as it lasts, the most absorbing; and it is the only human experience which, when it comes to an end, automatically confers a real if not perhaps a. very high kind of happiness. It is also the only experience this side of death which is by its nature solitary. But the oddest thing about it is that despite its intensity, despite its unequaled power over mind and body, when it is over you cannot really remember it at all. Love and hate and fear, hunger and thirst, triumph and defeat—these we can in some degree re-live. But pain, more vivid and compelling at the time than any of them, leaves none of its reality behind; we remember the scenery—the room or the tent, a face or a smell or a noise—but we have forgotten the play and our exacting part in it. –.Hart-Davis, London |
| PHILIPPINE FOREIGN SECRETARY Carlos Rornulo, who measures only 1.63metres, says he lost self—consciousness about his height when he visited Madame Tussaud’s London Wax Museum and discovered that he was five centimetres taller than Napoleon. He promptly threw away his elevator shoes. |
| PHILOSOPHER PSCYCHOLOGIST Henri Bergson once asked cellist Pablo Casals what he felt when he was playing the music of Bach or Beethoven. Casals replied that if he was satisfied with his performance, he had an almost physical sensation of bearing a tangible weight of something inestimably precious within. He likened it to carrying inside himself a lump of gold.—H. L. Kirk in Pablo Casals: A Biography |
| PHYLLIS McGINLEY : God knows that a mother needs for!Rude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents. The young on their way to maturity long for privacy, physical and spiritual. They resent being too well understood, and they abhor having their emotions dragged into the light. Mothers who can forbear to pry and question, who have the selfpossession to let children weather their own storms; who, above all, respect confidences but do not demand them, will find those same confidences being given without demand. And their children will be stronger persons. Or so one hopes. |
| Phyllis McGinley: Though a seeker since my birth, Here is all I’ve learned on earth, This the gist of what I know : Give advice and buy a foe. Pressed for rules and verities, All I recollect are these : Feed a cold to starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-torrlong is never act. Scratch a myth and find a fact. Stitch in time saves twenty stitches. Give the rich, to please them, riches. Give to love your hearth and hall. But do not give advice at all. |
| PHYLLIS THEROUX, on perspective: There are three children in my family. If they were to confront a spider-web in the garden, each would react differently. The first child would examine the web and wonder how the spider wove it. The second would worry a great deal about where the spider was at that particular moment. And the third would exclaim, “Oh, look ! A trampoline.” One reality, three dimensions. — |
| PLAYWRIGHT EUGENE IONIESCO : In my school in France I learnt that French was my language and the most beautiful language in the world, that the French were the bravest people in the world, that they had always defeated their enemies, that if they were sometimes defeated it was because they were one against ten, or because there were quislings and traitors who sold them out. Then we moved to Bucharest. There, I was taught that my language was Romanian, that the most beautiful language in the world was not French but Romanian, that the Romanians had always defeated their enemies, that if they had not always defeated them it was because of traitors and quislings. I also learnt that it was not the French but the Romanians who were the greatest and the best of all. lt’s lucky I didn’t move to Japan a year later! |
| PRAYER is a wise and practical way to start the new year. But at the end of this year, if it turns out to be a better year than last, may we remember to praise God, who responded to our pleading. Let us not be like the man lost in the deep woods. Later, in describing the experience, he told how frightened he was and how he had even knelt and prayed. “Did God answer your prayer?” someone asked. “Oh, no !” was the reply. “Before God had a chance, a guide came along and showed me the path.” —Robert W. Youngs i |
| PRINCE MOHAMMED , brother of King Hussein of Jordan, spent a few days in San Francisco as the guest of an airline representative. The wining and dining was considerable —from one famous restaurant or mansion to another. It wasn’t until the last day of his visit that the Prince summoned up the courage to tell his host: “This is wonderful, but what I would really like to ”—and he whispered his yearning. That accounts for the incredible cortege of four limousines rolling up to a snacks stall. After gorging on hamburgers, potato chips and milkshakes, the Prince said, beaming, “I think I will invite them to open a franchise in Jordan.” —H.C. |
| PROFESSOR GORDON W.ALLPORT of Harvard University urges more psychological studies of. healthy people rather than of the sick, to learn why healthy people tick. Many psychological theorieS, he says, “are based on the behaviour of sick and anxious people, or upon the antics of captive and desperate rats,” with “few theories derived from the study of healthy human beings, those who strive not so much to preserve life as to make it worth living.” There have been many studies of criminals, he said, but few of lawabiders, many of fear but few of courage, more studies of hostility than of effective living with fellow men. |
| Published work becomes for the writer a second face:people can gaze upon it and say it is ugly or pretty , and you yourself can sometimes look in horror at its imperfections , but it is a face nonetheless and it is yours, and at the end of the day when you bring it home you know you have done your best – know your standards have been met- you can say without shame- Mine !! |
| QUARREL not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him. —Abraham Lincoln |
| R LEE SHARPS, on the necessity of accepting favours: One spring day, long ago, Father called me to go with him to old man Trussell’s blacksmith shop. He had left a rake and a hoe to be repaired. And they were ready when we came, looking like new..Father handed over a silver dollar, but Mr Trussell refused to take it. “No,” he said. “There’s no charge for that little job.” My insisted. If I should live a thousand years, I’ll never forge that blacksmith’s reply. “SiR,” he said to my father, “can’t you let a man do something just to stretch his soul?” |
| RABINDRANATH TAGORE, Nobel Prizewinning poet, once said, “I have on my table a violin string. It is free. I twist one end of it and it responds. It is free. But it is not free to do what a violin string is supposed to do—to produce music. So I take it, 6x it in my violin and tighten it until it is taut. Only then is it free to be a violin string.” By the same token we are free when our lives are uncommitted, but not to be what we were intended to be. Real freedom is not freedom from, but freedom for. |
| RACHEL CARSON , author of The Sea Around Us, is a marine biologist whose life seems dedicated to nature conservation. ‘“Sometimes in my study of shore life,” she once explained to me, “I would scoop up a specimen and take it to my house for examination under a microscope, but I always took it back later and returned it to the sea. I had to return it to the right place and at the correct tidal level, which meant that many times I would have to go down to the sea by torchlight in the middle of the night to put some little ocean creature back in its proper place.” |
| RAUL MANGLEAPUS , former Senator. the Philippines: What self-respecting democracy is not in a chronic mess ? Visit a country and if the Press is not free, if the people may not speak out, if their movement is limited then you will not find that country in a mess. You will find only order and contentment—because that is all you will he allowed to see:. Visit another country and if the Press there is free, if the people may speak out. if there is freedom of movement then you will wonder how that country is able to survive at all. Every time I visit Italy, Britain. France, West Germany. Japan or the US , I find things, indeed, in a terrible mess.I read the Press, listen to radio, watch TV , hear the man in the street. witness the demonstrations. the continuing popular impatience the virulent public debate , and were I one to value national order above the rights of Man, I would be depressed . But I am exhilarated for I see in this mess the development of a nation through the enharicement of the dignity of individual man |
| RAY BRADBURY, in his new introduction to Dandelion Wine: The people were gods and midgets and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. Isn’t that what life’s about—the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the miracle and say: “Oh, so that’s how you see itl”? |
| READING BOOKS in one’s youth is like looking out at the moon through a crevice. Reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s own courtyard. And reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. That is because the depths of the benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depths of one’s own experience. |
| Real critics ? Ah ! How perfectly charming they would be !I am always waiting for their arrival.An inaudible school would be nice. (In an interview) |
| REFUSE TO BE ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own to it yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle. —William Henry BulwerLytton |
| REMEMBER THE challenge of the high board at the swimming pool? After days of looking up at it I finally climbed the wet steps the platform. From there, it was higher than ever. But there were only two ways down: the steps to defeat or the dive to victory. You stood on the edge, shivering in the hot sun, deathly afraid. At last you leaned too far Forward, it was too late For retreat, and you dived off the edge. Remember? The high board was conquered in that instant, and you spent the rest of the day climbing steps and diving down. Climbing a thousand high boards, we live. In a thousand dives, demolishing fear, we turn into human beings. “~Richard Bach in A Gift of Wings |
| REVERENCE FOR life does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing; or the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. It refuses to let businessman imagine that he fulfils all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others —Albert : Schweitzer |
| Riches of embarrassment:It is surely discreditable, under the age of 30,not to be shy. Self assurance in the young betokens a lack of sensibility ; the boy o girl who is not shy at 22 , will at 42,become a bore. For shyness is the protective fluid within which our personalities are able to develop.Let the shy understand , therefore, that their disability is not merely an inconvenience but also a privilege ; a gift rather than an affliction. |
| RISCHARD EVANS : Those who gaze too much upon the past, who think too much about what might have been, are running something of the same risk as the driver who keeps his eyes too much upon his rearview mirror and is inattentive to the road ahead, Experience is a great teacher; it is the road we have been over. But the wrecks in the rear aren’t the ones we are now trying io avoid. It’s the curves ahead that count now. Whatever mistakes we have made, our only way out is ahead. This is life’s inflexible formula. What has been and might have been may well serve as a warning—but what may yet be is our cause of first concern. Shakespeare said, “What’s past is prologue.” |
| RISE IN TEMPERATURE , barometer falling, storm clouds moving in; watch for melancholia, restlessness and nightmares.Nobody has ever heard the weather reported this way. Yet it is no secret the weather can manipulate us as really and surely as a puppeteer wires his puppets. Moreover reactions to the weather are so universal that they have coloured our language. Every time we talk about stormy ernotions,tempestuous feelings, cloudy thinking of heated tempers; We acknowledge the weather as a force that helps to mould our moods. Physically, weather can give you a headache or a heart palpitation. On the mental side, weather can interfere with your speed in adding up your bills, it can raise or lower your IQ, and it can set off a crime wave, major or minor. —Jacqueline Berke and Vivian Wilson |
| ROBERT McCRACKEN : Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott were both lame. Byron was embittered by his lameness, brooded on it till he loathed it, never entered a public place but his mind reverted to it, so that much of the colour and zest of existence were lost to him. Scott, on the other hand, never complained or spoke one bitter word about his disability, not even to his dearest friend. In the circumstances it is not so very surprising that Sir Walter should have received a letter from Byron with this sentence in it.: “Ah, Scott, I would give my fame to have your happiness.” |
| ROBERT BENDINER : The traffic engineers who plan the motorized, or major, part of our lives are worried—and with good cause. For years they have been busy designing great highways with no sharp bends, junctions or traffic signals. And now that they have just about perfected the dream highway, what do we cussed humans use it for To dream. With all the natural hazards removed and mile after mile of beautiful road stretched out before him a man can, and often does, have his toe on the gas and his head in the clouds. And if he suddenly hears a horn dose to his ear, as likely as not it’s Gabriel’s. |
| ROBERT BOLT , who won an Oscar for his screenplay of A Man For All Seasons writes : Money makes you more greedy. But it is something more than that. It is not a matter of being corrupted. It is that, when you are earning very little, you must value yourself for what you are. When you are offered fortunes, unless you are very mature you are tempted to value yourself for what you’re earning. And you can fall into this temptation just when you are congratulating yourself for not having done so |
| ROBERT FROST was an occasional visitor to our University of Massachusetts Literary Club meetings during the 1950s. He would read his poems aloud to us and some times offer a viewpoint, but he refused to appraise students’ poems. Only once did a student succeed in cornering Frost. The boy persuaded him to read a complex, symbolfilled study he had written about the thoughts and reactions of a group of people who were attending a cocktail party. The poem ended with the line: “They talked of people who talked of people who talked of people.” Almost everyone agreed that the message thus conveyed was extraordinarily profound. We watched the great craggy white head as it nodded over the student work. “Son,” Frost said finally, “you’re just starting out. First go write rhymeydimey stuff.” |
| ROBERT FROST has little use for any academic regalia. But his practicality has found sensible service for all those multi-coloured silk hoods heaped on his broad shoulders while he has been acquiring. some 40 honorary degrees. He has had the hoods cut up into appropriate-sized squares and sewn together for a pair of elegant patchwork quilts. His explanation: “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.” |
| ROBERT FROST was interviewed on television, shortly before his death, by a group of reporters whose questions implied that this is the most difficult time man has ever lived through. They kept trying to badger the octogenarian poet into saying what they wanted him to say; but at last he succeeded in outshouting them and making himself heard : “Yes, yes, it’s a terribly difficult time for a man to try to save his soul—about as difficult as it always has been.” —Spencer Brown in New York Times Magazine |
| ROBERT FROST, the great but easy old poet, told me, “I leave a great deal to unfinished business.” Savour the richness of time and patience, of hope and faith, that lies in this simple utterance. There is much in the business of our lives that we cannot hasten, for all the urgency of speed that today devils us. There is muchand this is true of the most important of our affairs—that cannot be concluded in a day, a week or a month, but must be let to take a guided course. Robert Frost is, when I come to think of it, living as nature lives. When an acorn fallen from an oak at last splits husk, sprouts and begins to take root, Itow much unfinished business lies ahead of it ! It has no contract with the sun and rain to have become an oak tree by a certain date. But with their help it will grow until it towers and spreads shade, in the good time we call God’s. We ought as trustingly to let our plans and problems ripen to, solution, knowing there is another Hand in the business beside our own. |
| ROBERT GILRUTH , director of the Manned Spacecraft Centre at Houston,Texas, was a very special little boy. I know, because his father was my boss while Bob was at school. All little boys like to fold a sheet of paper and sail it like an aeroplane, but Bob made a science of it. He folded paper planes at various angles and sailed them down the front steps while his father held a stopwatch to compare the speed of the miniature aircraft. |
| ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON observed that art is the knowledge of what to leave out. Our memories, which leave out so much, are artists of this school. The incomplete survives,; the part outlives the whole. And we all know the agony of listening to a man who has total recall. Indeed, if a bore could stop short of making his recital complete, he would cease being so boring. Another charm of incompleteness : it haunts us with suggestion. Who has heard Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony without wondering where Schubert would have been taken by his themes? Look upward in a redwood forest, and you’ll see those giant shafts disappearing in a soft mist at dawn incomplete as trees, yet masters of suggestion. Man Gregg in For Future Doctors |
| ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSONs: Someone has written that love makes people believe in immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great a. tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years. —Dent, London |
| ROBERT MORLEY, actor and play-wright, on the imponderables: For all the inexplicable mysteries of life I have a compartment, a sort of deed box, which is seldom opened except to add to its contents. Very occasionally I have a rummage around in it. I take out perhaps the mystery of the universe, or even the mystery of survival after death; but they are soon back again. I am not, I tell myself, expected to solve that one, and I am grateful not to have to bother. |
| ROBERT MOSES : In our fumbling, democratic process we choose our highest officials in a haphazard way and, often, for extraneous reasons. It is a process impossible to explain logically to outsiders. It is easy to sneer at the theory that the job makes the man; but it is an astonishing fact that, somehow, the good man outdoes himself and measures up to the confidence we place in him. It sounds incredible, but so it is. And therein lies our hope for the future. |
| ROBERT NYE , on keeping the home fires burning: An open fire is real and royal. It casts a living spell over the drabbest furniture. It sends a beautiful signal of sanctuary up the chimney and out into the winter world. It breeds shadows on faces and books within the room it graces with its presence. It talks when we are silent, and it is silent when we talk.In short, an open fire is a way of having the sun in our houses during those long bleak months when it is lost to usor when, if the sun does appear, it is weak and low in the sky, creeping round from horizon to horizon. The ancients regarded the sun as the father of all fire, the source of all energy. So, since time began to make any sense at all, man has kindled the stored energy of the sun on his hearth in the winter time, and watched and dreamed ‘over that fire, and waited for the sun’s return in the spring. |
| ROBERT PAUL SMITH, In a jazz cafe late one night, I had been telling a Negro musician how wonderful he was and what a craven louse I was myself. I was wholly miserable. My job Was good but what I wanted more than anything else Was to be writing a novel. He sipped his drink, looked at me benignly and said in his solemn voice, “Don’t get hostile with yourself.” At the time I didn’t know what the words meant, so I remembered them until I did know. They mean that the one person in the world with whom you have to live continually, closely and irrevocably is yourself. You are your own unsleeping judge, jury and gaoler. It does not matter, assuming you are within the law, whether other people think what you are doing is right. ft does not even matter whether they think it is entertaining, useful or lucrative, or if they wished they could do what you do. What matters is whether it seems proper to you, what verdict you bring in on yourself : friendly or hostile. |
| ROBERT REYNOLDS : Many of our painful frustrations are caused by our driving desire to make an end of something or other. We work ourselves to death trying to make an end of unfinished business. We harass our dogs and our children today, training them for tomorrow. We are in a kind of cold rage to bring about a desired end in our own time and by our own means. Eternity must laugh at our pretences. To be driven by a passion to hurry the end is to famish our lives of a living present. |
| ROBERTO ROSSELLINI, late Italian film-maker, on learning: I have an immense treasure: my ignorance. For me it is a great joy to overcome it. If I can get others to profit from what I acquire, I have twice as much joy. As long as I go on discovering new things, life will be beautiful, but it will be too short for everything I want to learn. —Claude Lc Gentil in Daily Express, Manila |
| ROGER HILL in a speech : Some people treat life like a slot machine, trying to put in as little as possible and hoping to hit a jackpot . Wiser people think of Life as a solid investment from which they receive in terms of what they put in |
| ROGER ROSENBLATT , on criticism: l have seen many amazing things in my life but I have never seen anyone who could take criticism well. All criticism, be it casual or vicious or constructive, is unpalatable. Sure you can profit from criticism in the long and painful run. But taking it is something else. Taking it means letting it go down like custard no blinking, no flinching, no wishing you were dead |
| RUDOLPH FELLNER reminds his classes at Carnegie-Mellon University that “melody exists only in your memory, for at any given moment you are hearing only one note of the tune.” Music is a cumulative art. It is a chain of sounds through tirne, each sound taking its meaning from those that have gone before. It is not the art for amnesiacs |
| S.I. HAYAKAWA, on the great task that effective communication performs: It enables us to feel how others felt even if they lived thousands of kilometres away and centuries ago. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. |
| SAM MARX, Hollywood producer, has spent a good many sleepless nights trying to work out how much wisdom can be crammed into four words. He lists the following, each one neither more nor less than four words : In God we trust. This, too, shall pass. Live and let live. Still waters run dccp. Bad news travels fast. Love laughs at locksmiths. Nothing succeeds like success. Charity begins at home. Politicians make strange bedfellows. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Man proposes, God disposes. Let sleeping dogs lie. The moral may be : If you can’t say it in four words, don’t say it. —John Fuller |
| SAMUEL BUTLER, on an open mind: It Ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors, or it may be found a little drafty. |
| SAMUEL JOHNSON , on judging men: As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly. |
| SAMUEL JOHNSON-The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove. |
| SANTHA RAMA RAU ,writes in ‘This Week “ magazine: The door to Mahatma Gandhi’s hut in the Harijan colony of Delhi was always open, and I went there one day with a photograph I wanted him to autograph. When there was a pause in the quiet conversation surrounding him, I made my request. He took the photograph and then burst out laughing.“Why do you laugh?” I asked. I had thought the picture a good? clear likeness.“It’s an excellent picture,” he reassured me. “It’s just that I sometimes forget what an ugly little man I am l” |
| SECOND CHANCE : Of Course, you can’t unfry an egg, but there’s no law against thinking about it. If I had my life to live over, I would try to make more mistakes. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would be less hygienic. I would go more places. I would climb more moun-tains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice-cream and less spinach. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary troubles. You see, I have been one of those fellows who live prudently, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I have had my moments. But if I had it to do over again, I would have more of them—a lot more. I never go anywhere without a thermometer, a map, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do over, I would travel lighter. If I had my life to live over, I would start going barefoot a little earlier in the spring and stay that way a little later in the autumn. I would have more dogs. I would keep later hours. I would have more sweet-hearts. I would fish more. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would go to more circuses. In a world in which practically everybody else seems to be consecrated to the gravity of the situation, I would rise to glorify the levity of the situation. For I agree with Will Durant, who said, “Gaiety is wiser than wisdom.” If I had my life to live over, I’d pick more daisies. — Don Herold |
| SELF-RELIANCE does not mean that we have everything that we need. No country in the world is self-sufficient in all respects. Self-reliance is an attitude of mind. A poor man can be self-reliant. while a wealthy person may be dependent on others. Self-reliance means the capacity to make the utmost of what we have and the courage to do without what we do not and cannot have. —Lel Bahadur Shastri |
| Sex is a three-letter word which Sometimes needs Some old-fashioned four-letter words to convey Its full meaning: words like Help, give, care, love. |
| SILENCE Isn’t Always Golden Most of us fail all too often to express appreciation or consolation to those about us. Benjamin Franklin put his anger on it when he said, “As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence.” —George Crane |
| Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice. |
| SIR Rabindraniath Tagore, Nobel Prize-winning poet, once said, “I have on my table a violin string. It is free. I twist one end of it and it responds. It is free. But it is not free to do what a violin string is supposed to do—to produce music. So I take it, fix it in my violin and tighten it until it is taut. Only then is it free to be a violin string.” By the same token we are free when our lives are uncommitted, but not to be what we were intended to be. Real freedom is not freedom from, but freedom for. —Robert Youngs, |
| SIR WALTER SCOTT had a pleasant phrase for middle life; he called it reaching the other side of the hill. It is a stage which no doubt has its drawbacks. The wind is not so good, the limbs are not so tireless as in the ascent; the stride is shortened, and since we are descending we must be careful in placing the feet. But on the upward road the view was blocked by the slopes and there was no far prospect to be had except by looking backwards. Now the course is mercifully adapted to failing legs, we can rest and reflect since the summit has been passed, and there is a wide country before us,’ though the horizon is mist and shadow. —John Buchan in Memory HoldtheDow. |
| So much unhappiness,it seems to me,is due to nerves ;and bad nerves are the result of having nothing to do,or doing a thing badly, unsuccessfully or incompetently.Of all the unhappy people in the world ,the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.True happiness comes to him who does his work well ,followed by a relaxing and refreshing period of rest.True happiness comes from the right amount of work for the day. |
| SOCRATES in an anonymous anecdote about gossip: “Have you heard, 0 Socrates—” “Just a moment, friend,” said the sage. “Have you made sure that all you are going to tell me is true?” “Well, no. I just heard others say it.” “I see. Then we can scarcely bother with it unless it is something good. Will .it stand the test of goodness?” “Oh, no, indeed. On the contrary.” “Hmm. Perhaps, somehow, it is necessary that I know this in order to prevent harm to others.” “Well, no—” “Very well, then,” said Socrates, “let us forget about it. There are so many worthwhile things in life; we can’t afford to bother with what is so worthless as to be neither true nor good nor needful.” |
| Some of you may have the courage to throw yourselves into a life of expressive protest against injustice. More power to you, as long as you seek to build justice, not simply to punish the unjust. The pleasure of harassing the oppressor is no substitute for the patience and the perseverance it takes to enlarge the capacities and the opportunities of others. –Kingman Brewster, Presidynt of Yak University, addressing graduates |
| Some people have a belief that every tree ,when it burns, gives back the colours that went into its making-they see in the flaming logs the red of many sunsets, the purple of early dawn, the silver of moonrise and the sparkle of stars.So it is with us: what we have accepted into our hearts and made a permanent part of ourselves, is given back in times of trials. |
| SOME YEARS AGO, Otto Klemperer, the great German conductor, and George de MendelssohnBartholdy, a recordingcompany executive, walked into a music shop. Klemperer went up to the young man behind the counter and asked, Do you have Klemperer conducting Beethoven’s Fifth?““No,“ said the young assistant. “We have it conducted by Ormandy and by Toscanini. Why do you want it by Klemperer?““Because,“ shouted Klemperer indignantly, “I am Klemperer !“The young man surveyed the conductor coolly for a couple of seconds. Then his eyes drifted towards George, and he said, “And that, I suppose, is Beethoven.““No,“ cried Klemperer. “That’s Mendelssohn l” P. M. |
| SOMERSET MAUGHAM in The Summing Up: Culture avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens character. Too often it gives rise to self-complacency. Who has not seen the scholar’s thin-lipped smile when he corrects a mis quotation and the connoisseur’s pained look when someone praises a picture he does not care for? There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields. There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled car. The stockbroker has his knowledge too, and so has the artisan. It is a silly prejudice of the intellectual that his is the only one that counts. |
| SOMERSET MAUGHAM : The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.Life is short, nature is hostile and Man is ridiculous. But oddly enough, most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain sense of humour and a good deal of horse sense,one can make a fairly good job of what is ,after all, a matter of very small consequence. |
| SOMERSET MAUGHAM in A Writer’ s Notebook: When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of 8o to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. —Heinemann, London |
| SOMERSET MAUGHAM was being honoured by the Garrick Club as part of his 80 thbirthday celebrations. The occasion was stately and moving. Maugham was introduced, took a standing ovation and, when the guests had regained their scats, began his address. He spoke the customary salutations, hesitated for a moment and said, “There are many virtues in growing old.”Maugham paused . He swallowed , he wet his lips , he looked about. The pause stretched out became too long—far too long .He looked down studying the tabletop. A terrible tremor of nervousness went through the room.Was he Ill ? Would he ever be able to get on with it? Finally, he looked up and said, “I’m just trying to think what they are.”As can be imagined, the house came down. |
| SPEAK LOVINGLY , Thoreau says, “The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.” I suppose there must be some things so cold that you can best understand them .by approaching them coldly.The Multiplication table, perhaps, or a time.table. Vou do well to be cool and detached when you are seeking infomation, but I remind you of the wife who complained, “When I ask John if he loves me, he thinks I am asking for information.” —Charles Curtis in A Commonplace Book |
| SPIRIT OF LIBERTY : What is the spirit of Liberty? I cannot define it ;I can only tell you my faith.The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right. It is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. It is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded. It is the spirit of Him who, nearly two thousand years ago , taught mankind a lesson it has never really learned, but has never quite forgotten: That there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. |
| ST FRANCIS CABRINI had her own ways of supporting the many charitable institutions she founded. When bills. for upkeep came, for example, she was known to stamp them Paid and send them back explaining gently that she knew the senders really Wished to contribute to God’s Work, and so she was saving them a lot of time and trouble. No one ever complained. |
| Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in Life. Do What You feel You have a flair for doing, and If You are good enough at It the money will come. |
| Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting on with People, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting with politicians |
| STEPHEN KING : Somewhere along the line, pernicious critics have invested the read-ing and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. If you want to preach, get a soapbox. |
| STRANGELY. the expounders of many of the great new ideas of history were frequently considered on the lunatic fringe for some or all of their lives. If one stands up and is counted, from time to time one may get knocked down. But remember this: a man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good. —Thomas Watson |
| STRESS is really an integral part of life. We set our whole pattern of life by our stress end point. If we hit it exactly we live dynamic, purposeful. useful, happy lives. If we go over, we break. If we stay too far under, we Vegetate. |
| STRIVE TO BE HAPPY(From an inscription in Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore via Field Notes)Go placidly amid the noise and haste ,and remember what peace there may be in silence.As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, listen to others, even the dull and ignorant-they too have their story.Avoid Loud and aggressive persons ,they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble. It is a real possession in the changing fortunes of Time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you for what virtue there is. Many persons strive for high ideals and everywhere life is full of heroism.Be Yourself .Especially do not feign affection .Neither be cynical about Love-for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is perennial, as the grass.Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of the youth. Nurture the strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars-you have a right to be here. And, whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore ,be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul.With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.Be careful .Strive to be happy. |
| Students Don’t come to the university to educate themselves., they throw themselves down in front of their teachers like a pile of boards to be turned into furniture. |
| STYLE, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense of style hates waste; the engineer with a sense of style economizes his material; the artisan with a sense of style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind:- North Whitehead, The Aims of Education |
| Success in writing – Unlike painting-means that your work becomes Cheaper , purchasable by anybody.Edward Hoagland |
| SUPREMACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL : Sometimes we hear someone talk about six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, and perhaps because he knows we cannot respond properly the speaker is indignant and rhetorical. But the man whose little girl has been hit by a car is the least indignant and rhetorical of all men, and when he sees the crumpled body he is too allbelieving. The great sadness of our history is that mortal imagination cannot summon the same grief for the casualties of an earthquake that it can for one little girl. Because it is only to individuals that compassion and sympathy belong. The desperate fact is that we cannot will our sympathy to the group. Bitter, though this truth is, we have not betrayed our heritage. We have made the individual supreme, because that is the only hope of exciting compassion and sympathy. Perhaps the day will come when our imagination Will not be surprised by vast numbers and we will be able to see every individual as integral in himself. If that day comes, it will he because we placed such high value on the single individual. Harry Golden |
| SUSAN ELLIS , on workaholics: People who are considered Workaholics may really be having fun. The only thing that distinguishes work from pleasure is which activity you prefer doing |
| SYDNEY HARRIS , on false modesty: Some men have an oblique way of expressing superiority by assuming an attitude of humility. But, as a great scientist observed about an aggressively diffident colleague: “He is not great enough to be that modest.” —P.N.S. |
| SYDNEY HARRIS : One man’s calamity is another man’s mild vexation; and often it is the same man on two different days. We respond not so much to the incidents of daily living as to the emanations our own personality emits into the atmosphere around us. We speak of being “out of sorts”—an apt phrase. When we are out of sorts, we actually dislike -ourselves; and when we dislike ourselves, it is impossible really to like anyone else. |
| SYDNEY HARRIS : People decline-invitations when they are “indisposed” physically and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full. of virus. If you are poor, Work. If you are rich, work. If you are burdened with seemingly unfair responsibilities, work. If you are happy, continue to work; idleness gives room for doubts and fears. If sorrow .overwhelms you, and loved ones seem not true, work. If dis-appointments come, work. If faith falters and reason fails, Just work. When dreams are shattered and hopes seem dead-4ork, work as if your life were in peril; it really is. No matter what ails you, work. Work faithfully, and work with faith. Work is the greatest material remedy available. Work vvill cure both mental and physical afflictions.–Sign in the reception room of a neurological institute |
| SYDNEY HARRIS on a trait of the great: However diverse their talents. temperaments and differences, all great achievers have one trait ir common: they never bother to compare themselves with other men, but are content to run their own race on their own terms. —ENS |
| SYDNEY HARRIS on the folly of showing off: The other e.veningt met an attractive and not unintelligent woman whose only fault was that she. was intolerable. She wanted to he liked and appreciated too fast. She burnt out like a firecracker between. the soup and the dessert. One of the most characteristic` failings of such people is their desperate need to make an impression. But people need to be unwrapped, slowly and deliciously. Those who tear off their own ribbons and rip open their own covers lose the very appreciation they are trying so desperately to win. —F.N.S. |
| SYDNEY J. HARRIS, on why judges should have children : There is absolutely no finer training for the bench than arbitrating a number of kids over the years. All the subliminal senses become developed : you can hear the tone of a lie, you can smell deception, you can almost feel the guilt of the prime offender. Then, too, the snarls you have to untangle are worthy of a Solomon at his most sublime. Who hit whom first? Who provoked it? And what was done to provoke the provocation ? Who gets the better record – player? Why should a 15-year-old boy going to a football game with friends have to take along his 10-year-old brother? Thorny questions arise every day—questions of sex, of age, of responsibility, of. family needs balanced against individual liberties. They call for the ultimate in tact and understanding, but also, at the same time, forcefulness and swift judgement Any wavering, any indecision, is seized upon as weakness and used as a wedge for further pleas. Children are natural-born lawyers; they go for the moot like a jaguar for the throat. A man who has never walked through this fire should not be eligible to be a judge |
| Talent is a long patience…..It is a matter of considering long and attentively what you want to express, so that you may discover an aspect of it that has never before been noticed or reported. There is a part of everything that remains unexplored ,for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire ,or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire, or tree, until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire. That is the way to become original. |
| TECHNICALLY and socially, the motor-car is caught in a fierce tug-of-war between freedom and discipline. Emotionally, it is the twentieth-century equivalent of a horse. But unlike a horse—or a ship—it has to he steered along narrow defined routes, in a herd of other mechanical steeds, and freedom becomes a mirage—art elusive dream of open road round the next cornet which vanishes after each bend. This points to the most important lesson we are going to be forced to learn about the motorcar age : we shall have to stop looking to motoring for emotional satisfactions, and find other outlets for the legitimate pleasures of speed, freedom, competition, adventure and even danger. Drivers must abandon the outlook of a Second World War fighter pilot and accept the discipline and restraints which are now a matter of course for commercial pilots. |
| Technique alone is never enough.You have to have the passion.Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder.Raymond Chandler |
| Thanks to Art, instead of seeing a single world—our own—we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists. |
| THANKS TO MY childhood, i was very disciplined by the time I grew up. I remember the method by which a nurse taught me to sew, when I was only six. After I had darned a sock, she would take the scissors and cut out all I had done, telling me to try again. This was very diScouraging, but it was goad training. At school in France, my teacher would read aloud old French sonnets, requiring that I recite them after one reading. When people have asked how I was able to get through some of the very bad periods in my later life, I have been able to tell them honestly that, because of all this early discipline, I inevitably grew into a really tough person. —Eleanor Roosevelt |
| THE more a man thinks, the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. |
| THE ABILITY to forget a sorrow is childhood’s most enchanting feature. It can also be exasperating to the point of frenzy. Little girls return from school with their hearts broken in two by a friend’s treachery or a teacher’s injustice. They sob the afternoon through, refuse dinner and go to sleep on tearsoaked pillows, Novice mothers lie awake with the shared burden. Experienced ones know better. They realize that if you come down in the morning to renew your solacing you will meet—what? Refreshed, wholehearted offspring who can’t understand what you’re talking about. Beware of making childhood’s griefs your own. They are no more lasting than soap bubbles. —Phyllis McGinley |
| The Ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince. others that they are having, their own way, is rare among men. Among women It is as common as eyebrows. |
| THE AMERICAN university system is built on the two false premises that all teachers must add to the existing stock of knowledge by research, and that all selfrespecting institutions fulfil their role only by employing productive scholars. Gouancz, Lxitadon |
| THE ART OF CONTENTMENT is the art of feeling that life is good at least for the day, or the hour. The sources of this feeling are usually the simplest. When artist Robert Gibbings made himself a wooden bench for his garden, he wrote: “And then I sat back and the scent of newsawn timber mingled with the scent of newmown lawn. I A thrush was singing from the pear tree, two goldfinches were searching among the tulips, a sulphuryellow butterfly flittered past; and behold, it was very good.”When Henry David Thoreau sat in his hut by Walden Pond and listened to the falling rain, he wrote:“’The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me, too. Some of my pleasant hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or autumn which confined me to the house, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves.”Edgar Andrew Collard in The Art of Contentment |
| THE BAMBOO for prosperity,” a Japanese friend explained to me, “the pine for long life, the plum for courage” “Why the plum for courage?”I asked, picturing courage as a great oak.“Yes, yes,” answered my friend.“The plum for courage, because the plum puts forth blossoms while the snow is still on the ground.” —Anne Morrow Lindbergh,in Gift From the Sea |
| THE BEAUTY of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones—which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones, –Sydney Harris, |
| THE BEST CONVERSATION : One of our problems, I think, is that we don’t discuss the arts or politics naturally. We try to sound too intelligent and too sage instead of human. The best discussion of Shakespeare I’ve ever had was with a booking agent who was arranging a Shakespeare lecture for me. He had a profound and honest comment to make. He said, “What I most admire about Shakespeare is that he was a guy who said when he made enough he was going to quit, and when he made enough he quit.” |
| The best thing for disturbances of the spirit is to learn. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies ,you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-to learn |
| THE BULK OF our spoken language is made up of onensyllable words; ten commonly used words account for 25 per cent of our conversation, and 100 highfrequency words for as much as 75 per cent of all small talk. Yet individuality is expressed by uncommon words, and one is as definitely identified by his language as by his finger prints. We should strive for the special words that will best express our true selves and above all avoid parrot like repetition of ready coined words and slogans. —Mario Pei, Professor of Romance Philology, Columbia University |
| The chief lesson that I have learnt in a long career is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him :and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to mistrust him and show him your mistrust. |
| THE choice of how to make one’s living is crucial, for the work a man does makes him what he will become. The blacksmith pounds the anvil, but the anvil also pounds the blacksmith. The clam’s shell turns golden in the brown -depths of the ocean, and in far more subtle ways is a man’s mind coloured by the course of his life. So when a man chooses his labour, he chooses his future self. |
| THE CONVENTIONAL assumption is that women are more vain than men, but several portrait painters, whose acquaintance with vanity is more than passing, have had the contrary impression. One painter has observed that a woman is satisfied with her portrait if it takes ten years off her age, but a man is never satisfied. “I think you have caught the Napoleon in me,” the male sitter grudgingly grants the painter. “But have you caught the Shelley?” —Paul Pickrel in Harper’s Magazine |
| THE CREATIVE process requires more than reason. Most original thinking is not even verbal. It creates a groping experimentation with idea ,governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious. The majority of well educated men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. |
| THE CRITERIA of emotional maturity are : Having the ability to deal constructively with reality. Having the capacity to adapt to change. Having a relative freedom from symptoms that are produced by tensions and anxieties. Having the capacity to find more satisfaction in giving than in receiving. Having the capacity to relate to other people in a consistent manner with mutual satisfaction and helpfulness. Having the capacity to sublimate, to direct one’s instinctive hostile energy into creative and constructive outlets. Having the capacity to love. |
| The critic is he who can translate into another manner of a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest , as the lowest ,form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.(The picture of Dorian Gray) |
| The differences in human life depend ,for the most part,not on what men do but upon the meaning and purpose of their acts.All are born,all die,all lose their loved ones,nearly all marry and nearly all work:but the significance of these acts vary enormously. |
| The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he also knows too much making him unfit to speak with detachment |
| THE DRAB PROCESS known as “going steady” is a clear violation not only of English grammar but also of the most elementary principles of biology. Where is natural selection? Where is the survival of the fittest? Where is the evolution of the race if you young males meekly submit to the inexorably monogamous possessiveness of the first female who deigns to notice you? What is to become of the spirit of scientific inquiry? What is to become of the controlled experiment, which forms the very basis of the advancement of knowledge? Indeed, what is to become of the uncontrolled experiment? If I am not mistaken, Thomas Edison tried out some 1,600 different substances before he finally selected one as the best filament for the electric light bulb. Am I to understand that you regard good procreation as less important than good illumination? Such a sad state of monotonous monogamy has not always prevailed. In my younger days, a man who brought the same girl to every dance was rightfully regarded as a ‘nail without resources, without imagination, without elan vital. We did not shrink from fair competition, the life of trade. The spirit of free enterprise had tree play, and play it did. The lordly stag, now, alas, almost extinct, was then monarch of all he surveyed, as he enjoyed what should be the inalienable rights of every young malethe rights of life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit. Yes, those were great days, and 1 commend to you, gentlemen, the lessons of that glorious past. Undergraduates of the World, arise you have nothing to lose but your silk and nylon |
| THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE , speaking in Britain’s House of Lords : If I were to introduce a motto for the use of leisure hours, I think I would say this: If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. If you get fun out of a thing, it does not matter if you do it badly. I play tennis and—though, alas, I do it no longer—I used to ride. But I do both abominably. I broke the heart of a chap who tried to teach me tennis, and I frequently fell off my horse. If I had said to myself, “You are no good at either, so don’t. do them,” I should have missed an enormous amount of pleasure. So T say, if you like to do a thing, do it as hard as you can and you will get fUn from your pursuits. |
| The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. |
| THE ELDER ALEXANDRE DUMAS set himself a certain number of pages to write per day. Nor would he stop until every line on every one of these pages was written. On the very middle of a page—his last for the day—he completed The Three Musketeers. He drew a line across the page’s centre; and under it he wrote these headlines: “The Count of Monte Cristo: a Romance; by Alexandre Dumas.” Then he wrote the first halfpage of Monte Cristo on the same sheet as the last halfpage of The Three Musketeers. Inspiration—or the will to work, which amounts to much the same thing—can be taught thus to come at call, and to be almost always at its best. I think the inspiration that cannot be trained to obey the summons of a writer is like a dog that cannot be trained to come to its master’s call. The sooner both of them are got rid of, the better. |
| The error of Youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of AGE is to believe that experience substitute for intelligence. |
| THE EXPERIMENTAL psychologists have recently found that visceral organs can be taught to do various things, as easily as a boy learns‘ to ride a bicycle. It is claimed that by certain techniques of conditioning you can teach your kidneys to change the rate of urine formation; you can raise or lower your blood pressure, change your heart rate, write different brain waves, at will. This is extremely important, I know, and one ought to feel elated by. the prospect of taking personal charge and running one’s cells around like toy trains. My trouble is a lack of confidence in myself. If I were informed tomorrow that I was indirect communication with my liver, and could now take over, I would not be able to think of the first thing to do. I’d sooner be told, 10,000metres above ground, that the 747jet in which I had a seat was now mine to operate as I pleased. No, nothing would save me and my liver, if I were in charge. I have the same feeling about the rest of my working parts. Whatever they do, they are all better off without my intervention. |
| The fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realizes life for us ,and gives to it a momentary perfection….that spirit of choice ,the subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and one who does not possess this faculty cannot create anything at all in art.(in The critic as an artist) |
| The first general rule for friendship is to be a friend, to be open , natural ,interested;the second rule is to take time for friendship.Friendship ,after all ,is what life is finally about. Everything material and professional exists in the end for persons. |
| The first rule of wise financial Management is to save Something for a rainy day; the second, to distinguish between light sprinkles and Heavy showers |
| THE FIRST symptom of true love in a man is timidity; in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other. —Victor Hugo |
| THE GOOD LIFE exists only when you stop wanting a better one. It is the condition of savouring what is, rather than longing for what might be. The itch for things so brilliantly injected by those who make and sell them is in effect a virus draining the soul of contentment. A man never earns enough, a woman is never beautiful enough, clothes are never new enough, the house is never furnished enough, the food is never fancy enough. There is a point at which salvation lies in stepping ofi the escalator, of saying, “Enough: What I have will do, what I make of it is up to me.”—Marya Mannes |
| THE GREAT FUN of getting up in the morning, even to men in prison, is that something you cannot predict may happen to you that day. Although we have laws on the books against gambling, life itself is an immense gamble and let’s be thankful for that. The man who invents a Futuroid camera will have done more to make life unliveable than the man who invented the Hbomb. —Al Capp |
| The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you , but he will make a fool of himself too. |
| THE greatest charm of marriage, in fact that which renders it irresistible to those who have once tasted it, is the duologue, the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone till death breaks the record. Cyril Connolly. The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Ilamilton, London) |
| The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. I have met people so empty of joy that when I clasped their frosty fingertips it seemed as if I were Helen Keller |
| THE HAPPINESS of life is made up of minute fractions—the little, soonforgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a look,a heartfelt cornpliment—countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.——Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
| THE HEART has its own memory. A woman who cannot recollect the most important great events will recollect through a lifetime things which appealed to her feelings. —Balzac |
| The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith. But it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage.: The courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and the rights of their conscience. |
| The highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied by cheerfulness.We have sufficient proof on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive companions. |
| THE HUMAN story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye. —Winston Churchill 5 |
| THE IDEA OF COURAGE as the measure of a man is an illuision. Actually, one man’s courage may be another man’s stupidity, or foolhardiness—or even cowardly obedience. A man’s acts of bravery can be evaluated only in relation to his fears. Of two men acting courageously in a crisis, one may be totally without fear and therefore ought not to be credited with much bravery, while the other is holding terror in check and deserves great admiration. And how shall we judge the bravery of a man who might not fight back when struck by someone in the street—but who might swim out to save a person from drowning? |
| The identification of old age with growing old must be avoided. Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age. I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30. E.M.Forester |
| THE IDENTIFYING of values to which we can all give allegiance is a light preliminary exercise before the real and heroic task; to make the values live. Values have been carved on monuments and spelled out in illuminated manuscripts. We do not need more of that. They must be made to live in the acts of men. —John Gardner in The Recovery of Confidence |
| THE IMPORTANCE of one event in any life is directly proportionate to its intensity. It may take a man a year to travel around the world, and the year may leave absolutely no impression on him. It may take him only a second to see the face of a woman – and that second may change his entire future. The example is extreme, though far from uncommon. —James Feiblemari, in The Way of a Man |
| The KNIGHTS OF COLOMBUS , a Roman Catholic organization, were making their annual presentation of a generous cheque to Cardinal Spellman for one of his favourite charities, the New York Foundling Hospital. He accepted with his customary warmth and, in return, presented the Grand Knight with a token of his gratitude*a handsome medallion of Pope Iohn XXIII. The newly elected Grand Knight, already under a strain from his first appearance in the limelight and further unnerved by the unexpectedness of the gift, fumbled and dropped the medallion. Red faced, he stooped to pick it up. But his embarrassment changed magically to mirth as Cardinal Spellman said with a smile, “Heads ” |
| THE LATE GENE FOWLER , oldtime journalist and friend of the famous, was once asked, “What is success?”“I shall tell you,” he said, “out of the wisdom of my years. It is a toy balloon among children armed with sharp pins.”—IIedda Hopper and ]ames Brough. The Whole Truth and Nothing But |
| THE LAW OF WORK does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his Pay in money also —Mark Twain |
| The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise you own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”~ John Burroughs |
| THE LONGING for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| THE MAN who first abused his fellows with swearwords instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization. —.John Cohen |
| The Man who says that he will work only When The World has become perfect, and Then he will enjoy bliss, is as likely to succeed as The Man who sits beside a river and says: “I shall cross When all The water has run into The ocean.” |
| THE MASS of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality. |
| THE MECHANISM of the human heart, when you thoroughly understand it, is like all the other works of nature, very beautiful, very wonderful, but very simple. When it does not work well, the fault is not in the machinery but in the management. -T. C. Haliburtom |
| THE MEN AND WOMEN who make the best life companions seem to lave given up hope of doing something else. They have, perhaps, tried to be poets or painters: they have tried to be actors, scientists and musicians. But some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambitions and left them the leisure to take an interest in the lives of others. Your ambitious man is selfish. No matter how secret his ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the people whose wills are subdued to fate give us consideration, recognition and welcome. |
| THE MEN who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable—for they determine whether we use power or power uses U.S. —John P. Kennedy |
| The MIDDLE ROAD . I hold that the summit of civilization is touched by the middle class, that the middle class produces civilization because it is the only class constantly trained to come to a conclusion. It is not rich enough to have everything, nor poor enough to have nothing—and has to choose: to choose between a succulent table and a fine library, between travel and a flat in town; between a car and a new baby; it has enough of the superfluous to give it freedom from necessity, but only through the constant use of discrimination. Its life therefore is one long training of the judgement and the will. When the rich become too rich and the poor too poor, and fewer and fewer people live under the constant discipline of their decisions, the age of greatness withers. To produce the lifelong stimulus of choice in both thought and action should be the aim of all education, and the statesman ought above all things to provide a government that remains in the hands of people whose life has trained them in the inestimable art of making up their minds, —Freya Stark in The Lyciern Shore (Harcourt, Brace) |
| THE MIND likes a strange idea as much as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. If we watch ourselves honestly, we Shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. —Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (Hutchinson, London) |
| The moment criticism exercises any influence, it ceases to be criticism .The aim of a true critic is to try to chronicle his own moods ,not to try to correct the masterpieces of others. (In an interview) |
| THE more a man thinks, the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. –Ernest Dimwit |
| The more power you acquire, the less you Know; for a powerful man is totally insulated by his subordinates, who tell him what they think he wants to hear or what will support their previous decisions ,and not WHAT HE SHOULD BE TOLD. Sydney Harris. |
| The more we study Art, the less we care for nature .What Art reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design ,her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions ,of course, but as Aristotle once pointed out, she cannot carry them out. |
| THE MOST SERIOUS threat to a person’s progress arises from his efforts to keep safe in his job, to see to it that he doesn’t make mistakes. Sometimes when we adopt “safe” attitudes we tell ourselves that we don’t disagree with the boss because we are loyal to him and the organization. Far be it from me to belittle loyalty, but I would rather have a little disagreement. I’d rather someone gave me ar. argument. Let us remember that when two men in an organization think exactly alike, we can get along, without one of them. |
| The MUSIC PUBLISHERS of Beethoven’s time were so afraid of his dissonances“ that he inscribed one quartet with the ironically reassuring line:“Not too original—borrowed from many sources.” |
| The night has a thousand eyes And the day but one ;Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying Sun.The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one ; Yet the light of a whole Life dies When Love is done.Francis W.Bourdillon |
| The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes ,and see in it whatever one chooses to see ; and the Beauty ,that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element ,makes the critic a creator in his turn ,and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel ,or graved the gem(in the critic as an artist) |
| The One thing all charming People have in common, no matter how they may differ in other respects, is an amused detachment from their commonplace troubles. |
| The only gracious way to accept an insult is, to ignore it; If you can’t ignore it, top it;If you can’t top it, laugh at it;If you can’t laugh at it, It is probably deserved. |
| THE OVERWHELMING fact about knowledge today is its volume. The spirit of enquiry set in motion during the Renaissance has continued to reap a harvest of facts and ideas and achievements that seems endless. What happens to all this knowledge? It is published. The amount of published information is increasing at a formid-able rate. Our present knowledge is contained in over too million kilometres of linear print—more kilometres than there are from here to the sun. And the size of this store of knowledge is doubling about every ten years. —Eleanor Van Zandt |
| THE PEASANTS of the Middle. Ages, who usually lived on the edges of forests, used to cook with charcoal, their most convenient fuel. Now, after so many years of progress, when we find a restaurant that charges us extra for its super de luxe cuisine, we also find that it cooks with charcoal. Thus we regard as a luxury what our poorest ancestors took for granted. Primitive women used to dress in the furs of the animals their men. killed for food. Nov, devoted husbands plot and plan and toil to buy the things their ancestors tossed to their women with hardly a thought. And what do men do in our time, once they snatch a little leisure? They go hunting and fishing, often at enormous expense, after travelling perhaps hundreds of miles. Primitive men, on the other hand, just did. it, and then, with the cave well stocked, took their ease. Perhaps our ancestors are laughing at us? JB. Priestley |
| The Percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long, drawn-out vacillations, and decisiveness Itself makes things go and creates confidence, |
| The PRINCIPAL GOAL of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive and discoverers. —Jean Paget. swiss Psychologist |
| THE PROSPECTS never looked brighter, and the problems never looked tougher. Anyone who isn’t stirred by both of those statements is too tired to be of much use to us in the days ahead. —John Gardner in No Easy Victories |
| The reasonable man adapts himself to the world : the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man |
| THE remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbours as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant towards others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world. —Eric Hoffer in The Passionate State of Mind |
| The reputation of a man is like his shadow .It follows him and sometimes precedes him ; it is sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than the actual size. |
| The SADDEST WORD . . .Norman Zierold , a student at the University of Iowa, is paying his way through the university not by selling magazines but by writing for them. Deciding to try to build a feature round “The Saddest Word in the English Language,” he wrote and asked a number of famous people for their selections. An amazing percentage replied, and their answers were interestingand characteristic. Here are a few:T. S. Eliot: “The saddest word in the English language is, of course,‘saddest.’ “Oscar Hammerstein ll: “The saddest word I know is ‘but.’ “John Dos Passos quoted Keats : “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell. . . .”Karl Menninger, the psychiatrist: “Unloved.”Emily Klmhrough: “The phrase I count pathetic, and blanch when I hear it, is when, at the conclusion of a story, the storyteller says, ‘Well, it Was awfully funny the way he told‘ it.’ ”Bernard M. Baruch: “Hopeless.”George Balanchine, the choreographer: “The saddest word in the English languageor in any language—is ‘vacuum.’ ”Harry Truman quoted Iohn Greenleaf Whittier: For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these.‘ “It might have been!”Alexandra Tolstoy: “The saddest word in all languages, which has brought the world to its present condition, is ‘atheism.’ |
| The same physical act may be in one situation vulgar and in another holy.The same work may be elevating or degrading.The major question is not “what act do I perform?”but “in what frame do I put it?’ |
| THE SILKWORM builds his cocoon with great love and infinite patience It is a beautiful cocoon; but the silk worm cannot get out of it and ultimately dies in it. The material, world, too, is like a beautiful cocoon We build it with great affection an imprison ourselves in it, forgetting that there are more beautiful things outside. – Sri Ramakrishna |
| The State of the mind that questions is much more important than the question Itself. Any question may be asked by a slavish mind, and the answer It receives will still be within the limitations of Its own slavery. |
| THE SUN’ is so large that, if it were hollow, it could contain more than one million worlds the size of our earth. There are stars in space so large that they could easily hold 500 million suns the size of ours. There are about 100000 million stars in the average galaxy—and at least 100 million galaxies in known space. Who says it’s a small world? — |
| THE TALMUD, on strength: There are ten strong things. Iron is strong, but fire melts it. Fire is strong, but water quenches it. Water is strong, but the clouds evaporate it. Clouds are strong, but wind drives them away. Man is strong, but fears cast him down. Fear is strong, but sleep overcomes it. Sleep is strong, yet death is stronger. But loving-kindness survives death. |
| The Telephone has been described by a sociologist as “The greatest nuisance among conveniences and The greatest convenience among nuisances. |
| THE THING that gives me, and has always given me, the most happiness in life is writing. As Emerson said, “The mind celebrates every time it formulates a thought. I had one yesterday and it cheered me up all day. Kenneth Clark |
| THE COMMENTATOR was interviewing J. B. Priestley on the B.B.C. “How do you account for your rise to the heights, Mr. Priestley,” he queried, “when so many of your classmates in journalism seemed to show as much if not more promise?” The author answered slowly, “As for anyone else, I cannot say. I only know I cared like blazes !” —Clarice Bowman |
| THE LATE Haakon VII of Norway, as king of a constitutional democratic monarchy, had only very limited authority. Once, during a cabinet meeting, he accidentally dropped his handkerchief. A cabinet member picked it up and handed it to him. “Thank you very much,” said the King, taking the handkerchief. Then he added with a smile, “This is the only thing I dare put my nose into.” |
| THE U.S. AMBASSADOR to Mexico, Robert Hill, had been at his post barely two days when he called a meeting to arrange for a welcoming reception for “everyone.” “All of the officials, you mean, Mr. Ambassador,” offered an aide. “I said everyone,” replied the Ambassador. “Oh, the officials and the staff,” ventured the aide. “When I say everyone, I mean everyone,” thundered Mr. Hill. Four days later over goo surprised clerks, electricians, chauffeurs and stenographers, mixed up with the usual officials and attaches, were enjoying themselves at the Embassy. |
| THE THINGS THAT CAN be Put Off Lawrence Lowell, a famous president of Harvard, once said to me that he had tried to train himself to begin the day by doing the things that could be put off and leaving till later what could not be put off. That which “can be put off” means not only that which will not be mechanically brought for-ward by an interview already fixed or an urgent letter on the deslc; it also often means some question which,. without a special effort of volition, we should be inclined to put off, a problem with slightly uncomfortable associations, or an inchoate train of still vague and only partially conscious thought which will drift into forgetfulness unless the “salt box” is used. |
| The three really great things in The World are a mountain, The ocean and an earnest Man at his work. The potentialities of each are beyond human calculation. |
| THE TIME to hear bird music is between four and six in the morning. Seven o’clock is not too late, but by eight the singers’ fine rapture is over, because, I suspect, of the contentment of the inner man that comes with breakfast; a poet should always be hungry or have a lost love. —Donald CuIro:s Peattie |
| THE TYRANNY of the Telephone: There’s something about the telephone that only a trained psychologist could explain. You receive a letter and you either open it or leave it unopened; as you wish; it awaits your pleasure. If a visitor knocks, you still hold the initiative you can open the door at your leisure, or maybe not at all. But let that telephone ring and all hell breaks loose… In summer and winter, in bed or out, you make a beeline for that instrument—nothing matters except to reach it. And then what? A wrong number perhaps, or some fellow says, “How are things?” Harry Golden |
| THE UNTHINKING assumption. that Columbus “discovered” America is. sheer arrogance. A million people were living there before 1492, and the only thing Columbus discovered was the ignorance of his forbears. |
| The value of passion ,like fire, is judged by the amount of warmth and light it creates. Fanatics, like forest fires ,burn bright ,but destroy all in their path that is tender and green.To be useful, fire must be confined. To live passionately, we must develop discipline. To love powerfully, we must forge bonds of commitment.Passion is inseparable from compassion. |
| THE WHOLE DISTINCTION between art and rubbish, food and refuse, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Peel an orange—in perfect quarters, or in staggered exfoliarions like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather did. Nothing is more likely to become a refuse than orange peel; but for a: long as anyone looks at it in delight , it stands a million triumphant mile: from the dustbin. — Robert Farrar Capon |
| THE WIFE of Vidal Sassoon, the hairstyling tycoon, says her husband has one very annoying tendency. “I’ll be talking away,” she relates,“and I get only a blank stare. When I chide that he hasn’t heard a word, he just looks at me and smiles. Of course, I always smile back.” Then Mrs Sassoon explains: “My husband spent so many years working in beauty salons, listening to ‘women twitter constantly, that he has the ability to tune out a conversation at will.” |
| THE WISDOM OF HUMILITY : There is only one thing worse than the smugness and prejudices of the ignorant and that is the smugness and prejudices of the “educated.” .Education that does not engender a sense of humility in the student, that does not make him appallingly aware of how much there is to know that he does |
| THE WISE MAN carries his ideas lightly like coloured balloons at a fair; the pedant drags his like ponderous ladders through crowded thoroughfares. —Paul Eldridge, fbans of GIau |
| THE WISER you are, the more you believe in equality, because the difference between what the most and the least learned people know is in expressibly trivial in relation to all that is unknown |
| THE WOMEN’S Liberation Movement seeks to cut the chains that attach women to men and children. Yet when they are severed, who will be liberated? And who will be left weeping? These chains are not just chains of brutal subordination and slavery. They are also chains of respect and love, care and mutual obligation. They bind civilized society together; and they cannot be broken without damage to women as well as to men and children. Woman cannot free herself without, at the same moment, freeing those who have obligations to her. What does this matter, indeed, when she is young and full of life, with the world at her feet? But a liberated woman of 70 or 80 alone, unloved, embittered—presents a rather grimmer picture. The old age of the male libertine is by tradition squalid. Who can bear to think of Don Juan—founder member of the Men’s Liberation Movement —at 80. the Great Lover become the Dirty Old Man? Why should women believe it will be better for them —The Daily Telegraph, London |
| THE WORD “lady” is somewhat out of favour. Many a woman would rather be thought womanly than a lady, which has acquired overtones of smelling salts and screaming at snakes. Yet, a true lady is as lovely a phenomenon as she is hard to define. A start is made by the old rule: a lady is a woman in whose presence a man is a gentleman. —Peg Bracken, I Day so Behave Myself |
| THE word intolerance, in today’s usage, has unjustly come to be considered reprehensible per se. Once this dreadful word is applied to an individual, few people even stop to consider the relative merits or demerits of whatever it is the accused person is accused of being intolerant of. Far from having too much intolerance, we have too little! For if we are to have craftsmanship, we must be intolerant of bungling. If we are to have learning, we must be intolerant of ignorance. If we are to have beauty and poetry, we must be intolerant of vulgarity. If we are to have excellence in anything, we must be intolerant of non-excellence. |
| THE WORLD of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build on others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead. —Clarence Day |
| THE YOUTH gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middleaged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. —Thoreau in his Journals |
| THEODORE ROOSEVELT lived every moment with magnificent gusto and was never known to rest except when he slept. He was the apostle of “The Strenuous Life. But Roosevelt himself insisted that the word “strenuos” did not quite express what he had in mind. As he conceived it, the strenuous life would take in Emerson as well as Lincoln; it might consist of writing poetry, or studying Red Indian songs. or investigating the labour problem or the condition of the poor. The important thing was to find something worth doing and do it with all your might. |
| THEODORE WHITE in The Mountain Road: You hold a block of metal in your hand. And it’s solid. Yet within the metal there are molecules, or atoms,’ all moving by laws of their own. Press a block of pure gold against a block of silver. When you separate them they seem unchanged. But good physical chemist will show you that where they have been in contact invisible flecks of gold have wandered across the barrier of structure and buried themselves in the silver. And atoms of silver, somehow, in the structure of gold. I think that when people are pressed close they behave in the same way. Part of you enters them, part of them enters you. Long after you forget the names and faces, they are still a part of you. Sometimes it is frightening to think that every person you have ever hated, or feared, or run away from is part of you. But so is every person you have ever learnt from, every friend you ever knew. —Pan Books, London |
| THERE are 640 million earthtype planets our own galaxy; planets so much like urs that you could step out of a space vehicle, to take a deep breath of oxygenated air and look up at a blue sky. Many astronomers and other scientists interested in the whole question believe that the universe is crawling with life. Is it n possible that much of it, since the numbers ar so staggering, is equal to us in intelligence, or superior, simply because human intelligence has existed for so relatively short a period? —Stanley Kubrick |
| THERE ARE talkers who have what maybe called jerky minds. They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death; their thoughts do not run in a natural sequence. After a jolting halfhour with one of these jerky companions, talking to a dull friend is a great relief. It is like taking a cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.—Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table |
| There are two kinds of People. One group believes that the government can support all the citizens. the other wonders whether all the citizens can support the government. |
| THERE are two sayings my wife and I have found extremely useful as shortcuts in communication. One was used by a monologist, years ago, who told of seeing a cat in the topmost branches of a tree. He climbed the tree to rescue the poor thing. When he reached the top, the cat turned out to be a wildcat. His only hint of what followed was to say, “I never got so tired of one animal in all my life.” The other phrase came from Harry Kelly, a comic billed as “The Deacon, who wore a long, doublebreasted frock coat, a high hat and a sorrowful expression. In a restaurant scene, the waiter asked him, “Are you enjoying your soup? Kelly just turned his sad eyes to the waiter and said, “I’m sorry I stirred it.” So whenever my wife tells me of something she has been through and says, “I never got so tired of one I know just how she feels. And when I report to her about an activity in which I got involved and say, “I’m sorry I stirred it,” she knows the depth of my despair and regret. —Howard Lindsay, The Phoenix Nest. edited by Martin Levin |
| There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all humans beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded. |
| There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age. |
| THERE IS A LOVELY old prayer used by fishermen on the coast of France: “O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small !” The prayer goes no further. Some say this is not a prayer at all, Yet we have here the groundwork and basis for all prayer: man standing consciously in the presence Of God. |
| THERE IS A peculiar beauty about godly old age—the beauty of holiness. Husband and wife who have fought the world side by side, who have made common stock of joy or sorrow, and become aged together, are not infrequently found curiously alike in personal appearance, in pitch and tone of voice, just as twin pebbles on the beach, exposed ‘to the same tidal influences, are each others alter ego.—Alexander Smith |
| THERE IS a school of psychiatrists who think that “blowing one’s top” is a good way to work off something bad. This view is held mostly by psychia-trists who cannot control their own tops. There is nothing to it. Blowing one’s top serves no good purpose; one blowing sets the habit more firmly for the next blowing. Children blow their tops; it is a childish adult whn finds it necessary to do so. |
| THERE is a story that while Socrates was in prison awaiting his death, he heard a man sing a difficult lyric by the poet Stesichoros. Socrates begged the singer to teach it to him. When asked why, the great philosopher replied, “I want to die knowing one more thing.” |
| THERE is a wonderful way to develop the ability to adapt to change. It is a simple drill with a far-reaching effect: do something new and different once each day for a while. Not necessarily anything extremely unusual or startling—it can be merely doing a familiar thing in a different way. If you always put on your left shoe first, try putting on the right one. Walk down a different side of the street from the one you are used to. This, a psychologist friend told us, forms new pathways in the brain. Then, when next you meet a block in some direction of thinking or action, you will be able to accept it constructively or come up with a way around it which previously might have seemed to lead to a dead end. Entirely apart from developing the ability to adapt, this discipline is also rewarding and pleasant in the doing and in the new doors that it opens. —Jean Hersey in The Shape of a Year |
| THERE IS an age at which a woman has to be beautiful to he loved. And then comes the age at which she has to be loved in order to stay beautiful. —Francoise Sagan, quoted in OuestFrance |
| THERE is an Arab philosophy about health. They say that health is the digit one, love is zero, glory zero success zero. Put the one of health beside the others and you are a rich man. But without the one of health, everything is zero. —jack Denton Scott |
| There is one topic forbidden to all well-bred mortals : namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have a headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, I beseech you hold your peace. |
| THERE is something so curiously tickling, so warming to the foolish heart in the phenomenon we call coincidence. When we thus catch life in the very act of rhyming, our inordinate Pleasure is a measure, perhaps, of how frightened we really are by the mystery of its uncharted seas. —Alexander Wool |
| THERE MAY BE no such thing as “sea level,” the base from which all `altitudes are measured. This has nothing to do with the difference in ‘level between one ocean and another ‘but with the level upon one ocean. If the Pacific were suddenly frozen in an absolute calm, with not a ripple on its Isurface, there would be “plateaus” and “depressions” in the water level with a difference in altitude of as 60 ft .These may be caused by atmospheric . pressure,or by something else still unkown |
| THERE must come the moment when, as Brother Leo wrote, all your mirrors turn into windows. That is the moment of growing up. The adolescent looks inward; the adult can look outward. —Pamela Frankau in Pen to Paper (Iteinemann, London) |
| THERE WOULD be no room to fly .It is not only birds that need room to fly. Space gives as a feeling of true freedom and relaxation|, whereas a room overcrowded with furniture and ornaments is conducive neither to work nor rest. This importance of empty spaces applies not only to our surroundings. It is, above all when we plan our days that it is essential to avoid filling in every moment . We need elbow room in time |
| THERE’S a great deal of similarity between a child’s growth and a nation’s. As a child is growing, you feel : “This is the worst moment,” and that if only you can get over this period, everything will be all right. First, the baby’s small, it’s yelling away. You say “If only it was bigger, it wouldn’t cry so much.” Well, it stops crying. But then you have other problems, which pose greater difficulties. It’s walking. It’s getting into the fire. And you say : “Well, when it’s older, it will be more responsible.” But with every age group, you then look back and feel that the last period was really an easier one. It’s the same with a nation. Once you reach a certain level of prosperity, the nature of problems changes. But until you get to that take-off stage, you will progressively be facing more and more acute problems, both economically and socially. —Indira Gandhi, quoted by Martin Page in the Illustrated London News |
| THERE’s so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living. Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine.” And what do we do? Back off and take its picture.. |
| THINGS REGARDED IN THEMSELVES ARE NEITHER BEAUTIFUL OR UGLY.If our sight were longer or shorter, what now appears beautiful would appear grotesque and what we now think misshapen ,we would regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through a microscope will appear horrible. |
| THOMAS BEECHAM conducted the Boston Symphony on several occasions. After one particularly successful programme, the audience would not let him go, recalling him with applause time and again. Finally, he signalled for silence and said,“Ladies and gentlemen, when I was a very young conductor I heard a deaf vicar in the front row say to his neighbour, “Why is be bowing? The musicians did all the work.”“So I shall now leave, and you may applaud these gentlemen to your hearts’ content.”in Evening of Symphony |
| THOMAS MERTON, American theologian (1915-1968) in New Seeds of Contemplation: It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your. head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you—try to share some Of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself ! |
| THOMAS PAINE in Age of Reason: It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. |
| THOMAS USK : It is my contention that nagging is a good thing. It has its perils, but it has its pleasures, too. It tells a man what he needs to know—that his wife is aware of his existence, his imperfections and his capacity for improvement. When my wife asks for the 17th time, “Where’s that clothes-line you promised to put up?” I realize how often she thinks about me and how strong are the emotions I arouse in her. When I finally get it up, my feeling of accomplishment is in direct proportion to the number of reminders it took. (Sometimes I do a job promptly, for the sly pleasure of taking her breath away.) Give me nagging then, not only because it is the spice of life, not merely as a measure of my wife’s devotion, but because it produces results. |
| THOREAU once said: “I had a smallbird alight; on my shoulder lor a moment while l was hoeing in the garden,and I felt more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.”39 |
| TIDINESS is one of those virtues that will never be assimilated with pleasure. It makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one, actually saves time and trouble to the person who practises it. Yet there must be some ominous flaw to explain why, in spite of the concerted effort of humanity to teach it to the young, millions in every generation continue to reject it. _Freya Stark in The Zodiac Arch. |
| Time is the coin of Your Life. It is the only coin You have, and only You can determine how It will be spent. Be careful lest You let other People spend It for You. |
| TIME IS too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, long for those who grieve. short for those who rejoice. But for those who love, time is not. — Henry Van Dyke |
| To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts ,nor even found a school ,but so to love wisdom as to the dozen. Down to the last detail we are all different. Everyone has his own fingerprints. Recognize and rejoice in that endless variety. The white light of the divine purpose streams down from Heaven to be broken up by these human prisms into all the colors of the Rainbow. Take your own color in the pattern and be just that. |
| To be nobody but myself,in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you somebody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight , and never stop fighting. |
| TO DARE , IS THE WISDOM.There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when………… |
| TO DISPENSE authority to others, surely a man must feel responsible—indeed answerable to the Almighty. If this is not so and he uses his authority for personal ends, the result, as we see all around us, is a steep decline in the respect shown to authority of any kind in any sphere. And if a man is conscious that he is ultimately responsible to a higher power, he will acquire that dignity which is so different from pomposity. |
| TO ERR is Human I don’t like cats. A cat is a poker-faced creature and I, for one, don’t take poker-faced animals or people at their face value. It is too easy to act deep and mysterious. I question the so-called wisdom of cats. I think they are bluffing. I like dogs because they spill their beans. A dog is no compote of cagey inhibitions. A cat makes no mistakes, but a dog starts to make mistakes the minute you enter the door. He wags without thinking it over. I like people who make mistakes. I want people to start to make mistakes when I first meet them. As soon as we make all our mistakes, we’ll know where we stand. Don Herold |
| TO GIVE WITHOUT any reward, or ny notice, has a special quality of its own. It is like presents made for older people when you were child. So much went into them—dreams and prayers and hours of knotted fingers and frozen effort and there … only a dirty piece of knotted string came out of it. But you knew, even if they didn’t, that you were giving them something worthy of them. There is something of worship or prayer in laying down an offering at someone’s feet and then going away quickly. The nicest gifts are those left, nameless and quiet, unburdened with love, or vanity, or the desire for attention. —Anne Morrow Lindbergh in The Flower and the Nettle |
| To go against the dominant thinking of Your friends, of most of the People You see Every day, is Perhaps the most difficult act of Heroism You can perform. |
| TO MOST of us the future seems unsure. But then it always has been; and we who have seen great changes must have great hopes. |
| TO REMEMBER ME . . .”That day will come when my body will lie upon a white sheet neatly tucked under four Corners of a mattress located in a hospital busily occupied with the living and the dying. At a certain moment a doctorwill determine that my brain has ceased to function and that. For allintents and purposes, my life has stopped.When that happens, do not attempt to instil artificial life into my body by the use of a machine. And don’t call this my deathbed. l.et it be called the Bed of Life, and let my body be taken from it to help others lead Fuller lives.Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby’s Face or love in the eyes of a woman. Give my heart to a person Whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain. Give my blood to the teenager who was pulled from the wreckage of his car, so that he might live to see his grandchildren play. Give my kidneys to one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week. Take my bones, every muscle, every fibre and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that someday, a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against her window.Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.If you must bury something, let it be my faults, my weaknesses and all prejudice against my fellow man.Give my sins to the devil. Give my soul to God.If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all I have asked, I will live forever. — Robert N. Test in Cincinatti Post |
| TO WAKE QUITE alone in a ‘strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go in the stream of the unknown. For this reason your customary thoughts, everything, in fact, which belongs to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance. The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell, but if you discard all this and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you. —Freya Stark in Baghdad Sketches (John Mutray) |
| TODAYS ATTITUDE towards children may be summed up in the words of a contemporary : have never tasted the breast of a chicken. When I was young we were given the drumstick, and our parents ate the breast. Now it is the children who are given the breast, and we still have the drumstick !” —Quoted by Elizabeth Pakenham in The Sunday Times, London |
| TODAYS WOMAN, an American monthly magazine, on how to tell a businessman from a businesswoman: A businessman is aggressive; a businesswoman is pushy. He’s good on details; she’s picky. He loses his temper because he’s so involved in his job; she’s bitchy. He follows through; she doesn’t know when to give up. His judgements are her prejudices. He is a man of the world; she’s been around. He climbed the ladder of success; she slept her way to the top. He’s a stern taskmaster; she’s hard to work for. |
| Tolerance is the first principle of community. It is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.No loss by flood or lightening, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile faces of nature has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed. |
| TOM HETZEL, marathon swimmer: The English Channel has a reverence to it; to swim it is the last pure adventure. Nothing contaminates it no advertisements, no prize money and it is open to anyone. The Channel is without prejudice; it does not ask me what colour I am, or what religion I believe in. It only says, “If you are good enough, you can have me, but you must prove it yourself.” Crossing the Channel has allowed me to say, “Yes, I can !” It’s like this: someone tells a young person he’ll never graduate from college, but he persists until he does. Another person may have overcome a particular handicap: an alcoholic, or a paraplegic. Everyone has an English Channel. Mine happens to be between England and France. – |
| Too Many, of our prejudices are like pyramids upside down. They rest on tiny, trivial incidents, but They spread upwards and outwards until They fill our minds. |
| TOSS AN OBJECT into the air and catch it. Now consider the extraordinary device (you yourself) that accomplished this everyday miracle. You sensed the energy of the toss, knew the value and the importance of success. You triangulated the position of the object throughout its flight with your binocular vision: you edited out distractions by other senses that might divert your attention: you brought an extraordinary signal mechanism into precise operation that triggered one set of muscles after another into a sequence of ground-to-air-missile direction-control processes resulting in easy success as you caught the object without thinking. Ask your friends who know micro-electronics best what it would cost and how much space it would take to achieve artificially what you achieved naturally. Anyone will admit that the problem of recon-stituting these simple excellences of yours would require a major government grant. But that’s just the easy part. Remember that all the miraculous abilities you demonstrated can be naturally and automatically packaged and preserved without the slightest impairment. for periods of 20 to 50 years or so in an ultra-microscopic part of you, received by you at no cost and forwarded into the future at the same price, in a tiny segment of a gene in a chromosome in a solution so concentrated that a single teaspoon could contain all the instructions needed to build and operate the’ 3,500 million people now on the planet. —David Brower In Foreword to Summer Isknd be Eliot Porter |
| TRADITION means giving votes to that obscurest of classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to surrender to the arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around. —G. K. Chesterton |
| TRUE FRIENDSHIP : a Rarity To be everybody’s friend is to be nobody’s friend. For friendship is the feeling you possess for a particular person as distinct from all other people. It is a very beautiful and intimate and close relationship which is destroyed if it is bestowed casually. To be able to say that you have a friend is to know that there is one person to whom your affairs are as im. portant as his own, on whose aid and counsel and affection you can count in all times of trouble and distress, to whose aid you will fly the moment you hear he needs your help. It is impossible for any man or woman to feel like that for more than a few people. —St. John Ervine in The Irish Digest |
| TRY , EVERY WEEK or so, to learn something by heart. A surprising amount will remain in the memory, and more and more as you train it. Then, as you walk or work or sit in the bus, you will have something more than daily trivialities to occupy your mind. |
| TRY THE THINGS You’re Bad At It is a great pleasure to do something you are good at. It is a small but unarguable one to do something you are bad at. Last summer I cleaned an outdoor overflow tank, removing from it the conglomerate evidence of a violent winter and spring. I did it awkwardly, slowly,. douhtless stupidly, but with a peculiar satisfaction, richer in certain ways than the satisfaction I get in writing this essay, which is a job I know I can handle with passable competence. Clifton Fadiman in Any Number Can Play |
| TUE LONGING for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. |
| TWILIGHT is outmoded. It disappeared with oil, lamps and antimacassars. Now with a snap of the light switch, we banish this gentle time, and our world is poorer thereby. Meditation, having the same rootword as medication, is essential to our wellbeing. Dusk, with its soft shadows and hazy landscapes, is conducive to nostalgia and contemplation, often resulting in valuable self scrutiny. Picture the human race being still awhile, thinking the thoughts that twilight brings. —Doreen Smit |
| Ultimately ,it is the dream within the person that counts more than anything else. If a parent can give a child a vision, he has given him of the best gifts. If a teacher can create an idea of what Life might be, she has done her part. |
| UNDERSTANDING is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do)and understand what we cannot pardon. |
| UNMITIGATED seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato. in his solemn old age, who said it. —George Sanhlyana |
| URIC BRONFENBRENNER in Two Worlds of Childhood: How can we judge the work of a society? On what basis can we predict how well a nation will survive and prosper? We propose this criterion: the concern of one generation for the next. If the children and the youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to un-derstand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise. – Russell Foundanon |
| US SENATOR SI Hayakawa in Symbol, Status, and Personality: Years ago I used to notice the differences among bus-drivers on the Indiana Avenue line in Chicago–a street often blocked by badly parked cars and huge trailer trucks manoeuvring in everybody’s way. Some drivers would get steamed up with rage, clang their bells and shout at the car drivers. At the end of the day they must have been nervous wrecks, jittery and hypertensive, a menace to their wives and children. Other bus-drivers, however, could sit and wait for minutes without impatience, calthly whistling a tune, cleaning their fingernails, writing their reports. In other words, confronted with the same objective situation, some men lived a hellish life of anger and nervous tension; others had a nice, relaxing job, with plenty of time for rest. |
| V. SACKVILLE WEST: There is nothing like the gentle,, removing touch of slight illness to induce meditation over some experience recently enjoyed. One must not be too ill, only just ill enough to justify a couple of days in bed, with sufficient fever to heighten the perceptions. Life is laid aside; one is vaguely aware of a wood pigeon cooing in the distance; the tap of a thrush on a snail; the rustle of the breeze through poplars; all things very small but significant. In these moments, these brief dedicated hours with leisure enforced, one may ruminate as vacantly as a cow recum-bent in her meadow. |
| VAN WYCK BROOKS in From a Writer’s Notebook: What curious tricks our minds play on us. Looking up from my desk, I saw a fly crawling on the windowpane. Then I saw that he was between the windowpane and the storm window outside it, and I knew he could never escape. At once I began to sympathize with him, toiling over this desert of glass with nothing to eat or drink; and at last I walked over to the inner window and raised it. “To open the window and let a wasp out—ah, is this not happiness?” a Chinese writer once exclaimed. And who forgets Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy when, catching the fly that tormented him, he thrust it out of the window, saying, “Get thee gone, poor devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for thee and me.” But how shortlived in me was this noble feeling. No sooner had I opened the inner window than it struck me that this fellow creature had become simply a fly in my study, and I knew he would soon be buzzing about my ears. All my tender feelings suddenly turned cold—I forgot Uncle Toby and the Chinese poet—and before I knew what I was doing I had crushed that fly. —Dent, London |
| VAN WYCK BROOKS in Frorn a Writer Notebook: Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side. —D, William James |
| VAN WYCK BROOKS: How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world about them. People of small calibre are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding. But magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, they have no reserves, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find in And, what is more, they find it everywhere. |
| VERA BRITTAIN in Testament of Experience: Watching my son and daughter grow up, in an age not merely of catastrophe but of wonder, a century of opportunity in the fullest and deepest sense, I perceived that to be born into an apocalyptic era may be a cause for rejoicing rather than lamentation; the problems to be resolved demand, and create, spiritual resources which the prosperous ease of a golden age will never inspire. Gollanez, London |
| VINCENT VAN GOGH : There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and One that is burning. The lamp was there and it was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too and that is its real function. —The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Thames. and Hudson, London) |
| VIOLINIST JASCHA HEIFETZ is an irnperious man who has formulated rules governing every aspect of behaviour, from neatness to finance to respect. When he taught at the Music Centre in Los Angeles, his classes were conducted as absolute autocracies. “You will play the passage in this manner,” he said one day, demonstrating to a pupil who had been suggesting another approach.“But, Mr Heifetz,” said the pupil, “you don’t understand.” The master stiffened. “Never say that. Say: ‘Mr Heifetz, I did not make myself clear.’” |
| VOLTAIRE believed that animals have certain advantages over man:. They never hear the clock strike. They die without any idea of death. They have no theologians to instruct them. Their last movements are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies. Their funerals cost them nothing. And no one starts lawsuits over their wills. |
| W. L. White: What, after all, is lightning? Lightning, friend, is with the sole exception of Holy Scriptures, God’s most comforting reassurance to mankind. For, as every man knows, you never see the flash that kills you. So the fact that God, in His infinite mercy, has allowed you to see this one, means that, in His infinite wisdom, He has decided that He might as well let you go on living. For a while, anyway. At least until the next bright flash because, during this interval, He has a second chance to add up the evidence pro and con, and to review His original decision (perhaps it was too hasty) as to whether or not you are fit to live. |
| W. Somerset Maugham in Strictly Personal: If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. —Heinemann, London |
| WALKING IS the exercise that needs no gymnasium. It is the prescription without medicine, the weight control without diet, the cosmetic found in no pharmacy. It is the tranquillizer without a pill, the therapy without a psychoanalyst, the fountain of youth that is no legend. A walk is the vacation that does not cost anything. |
| WALTER CHRYSLER was 55 and a master mechanic on a railroad when he bought his first automobile, a $5,000 four’door Locornobile, on borrowed money. The car was shipped to his home town in Iowa and towed to a barn at the Chrysler home. Chrysler studied that car for three months before he attempted to drive it. Referring to the instruction book,he took the vehicle apart, spread the pieces on newspapers and made sketches; then he put it back together. When he was sure he understood it, he drove it.. |
| Walter Chrysler once said : “The real secret of success is enthusiasm. Yes, more than enthusiasm, I would say excitement. I like to see men get excited. When they get excited they make a success of their lives.” The application of enthusiasm to occupations which seem drab and uninspiring often proves the magic touch that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. You can, by your thoughts, lift any aspect of life out of drabness, out of the ….. place, and cause it to be extraordinarily worthwhile. A real sense of purpose plus enthusiasm will en-hance your job, whatever it may be. One of the surest of all truths is that life will give you no more than you give it. Go all out for life and it will go all out for you. |
| WALTER GROPIUS , the late world famous architect, wrote to a group of students who had asked for career advice .For whatever profession, your inner devotion to tasks you have set yourself must be so deep that you can never be deflected from your aim However often the thread may be torn out of your hands you must develop enough patience to wind it up again and again. Act as if you are going to live forever and cast your plans way ahead. By this I mean that you rnust feel responsible without time limitation, and the consideration whether you may or rnay not be around to see the result should never enter your thoughts . If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick where you left of, and that will be your claim to immortality. |
| WALTER PISTON, answering critics’ complaints that the finale of his “Third Symphony” was too noisy: “It was written while an artesian well was being dug outside my window. I had to write music loud enough to drown out the noise.” W.P. |
| WARREN WEAVER , vicepresident for the natural and medical sciences, Rockefeller Foundation: We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignbrance. Is science really gaining in its assault on the totality of the unsolved? As science learns one answer, it learns :Several new questions. It is as though scientists were working in a great forest of ignorance; making an ever-larger circular clearing within which, not to insist on the pun, things are clear. But, as that circle becomes larger and larger, the circumference of contact with ignorance also gets longer and longer. Science learns more and more. But there is an ultimate sense in which it does not gain; for the volume of the appreciated but not understood keeps getting larger. |
| Water dries up at once if It is poured on a heap of ashes. Vanity is like a heap of ashes. Prayer and contemplation produce no effect upon a heart puffed up with vanity. |
| WC FIELDS, on his craft: An infallible rule I have in comedy is never to break anything. Only bend things, If you shatter a flower pot over some harassing oaf’s head, the laughing dies the moment the pot breaks. If you hit him with something that bends, the audience keens looking at the instrument responsible for the bludgeoning, and the laughs go on. Nothing brittle has any humour. I broke a billiard cue once; the audience was silent. When I got one that looked like iron and bent it, they went crazy. |
| WE ACT quite often as if we were not rich enough to deal seriously with the problem of poverty. But poverty is actually so costly—in terms of wasted energies and lost skills, of sickness and delinquency and crime—that a sensible society would realize that poverty is a luxury it can ill afford, and it would not tolerate slums for a day. —August Herkscher |
| We are not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts .We have certain work to do for our bread and that is to be done strenuously, other work to do for our delight and that is to be done heartily; neither is to be done by halves or shifts ,but with a will , and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. John Ruskin. |
| WE ARE PROUD of ourselves as lovers, yet. the rivalry in the animal kingdom is formidable. How many men can muster up a nuptial dance, which even a crab can do? Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we performed one as elaborate as the parades and posturings of dozens of birds or the “crazy dances” of cranes? Such a form of courtship should he, .edging. by our divorce rate; at least as reliable as those now in use. |
| WE CAN understand political behaviour better if we distribute opinions, not on a straight line, but in a circle so that the extreme Right and Left meet—as indeed they do, since both believe in suppressing ideas, in throttling freedom, in using violence, in making no distinction between ideas and heresies, between treason and dissent. The far Left and the far Right have much more in common with each other than either does with the Middle. |
| We have not, the reverent feeling for the rainbow, that the savage has, because we know how it is made.We have lost as much as we have gained, by prying into that matter. |
| WE HAVE permitted some queer self-consciousness to grow up around the art of letter writing. A letter should be a free and unselfconscious outpouring, scrawled on an old calendar or a brown paper bag if that comes to hand before the best bond. Salutations and closings are usually extraneous, having nothing to do with the mood or feeling of the writer. “Sincerely” . . . “yours truly” . . . “as ever”—what do they really mean? I love my correspondent who with-out any ado whatever begins, “Listen here.” What follows is usually worth listening to, and when she has finished she may append an initial or she may not. I recognize her handwriting, and she knows I will. Without having to bother to find proper writing materials and “compose” a proper letter many of us could dash off eloquent, even thoughtful, messages to our friends while we wait somewhere in a parked car or avert our faces from the most offensive television advertisements. |
| We hear on all sides the Youth is the most beautiful time of Life. therefore, I find It hard to understand why we so strenuously urge the You to think only of their future |
| WE LISTEN too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound. perhaps, but soothing. Every-body should have his personal sounds io listen for—sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive, or quiet and calm. As a matter of fact, one of the greatest sounds—and to me it is a sound—is utter, complete silence. |
| We live by faith or we do not live at all. Either we venture – or we vegetate. If we venture, we do so by faith simply because we cannot know the end of anything at its beginning. We risk marriage on faith or we stay single. We prepare for a profession by faith or we give up before we start. By faith we move mountains of opposition or we are stopped by molehills. |
| WE OUGHT TO learn from biology and go underground. In biology, the circulation systems are always on the inside. The idea in our cities is to take all things that have to do with machines and put them underground. This would leave the area above the ground to the walking people. Eventually, all urban transit will have to go under-ground, no matter what the cost. |
| WE talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But I sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life itself. At least this is true : that in proportion as passions become real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet. All real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm; and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. |
| WE talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But I sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life itself.At least this is true : that in proportion as passions become real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet.All real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm; and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. |
| We tolerate differences of opinions in People Who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion with People we do not know sound like heresy or plots. |
| WHAT A WOMAN my motherinlaw is ! Her hair colour runs from mauve to purple, and during the racing season she spends all her time at the track. My fatherinlaw breeds Great Danes and is completely ill at ease away from them. When he visits us, once a year, he looks at his grandsons with disbelief and says, “But they’re so small !” I have to remind him that these are children, not Great Danes, Once I commented to my husband that it was a wonder he was sane, coming from such a confused environment. “I wasn’t confused,” he said. “My father treated me like the pick of the litter, and my mother acted as if she had won me in the daily double—so I grew up feeling like the best of breed. What does environment matter to a child who is his parents’ prize?” —Lenore Woolf |
| WHAT are the most delicious scents? Everyone could make a list. Mine would contain sweetbrier in the air, so vague and elusive that search can-not trace the source. Pine trees on a hot day. Mint sauce. Newly split wood. Cinnamon. Ripe apples. Tea just opened. Coffee just ground. A racing.stable. A dairy farm. Cigars in a box. A circus. And I have said nothing of flowers ! —E. V. Luca: |
| WHAT CAN I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the’ dictator- controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of; rubbish. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because: it is the product of so many men, it, is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended. —John Steinbeck in . |
| What causes a burnout? The immediate cause is a mismatch between effort and results. Burnout victims start out full of fire and good intentions, but their efforts are not repaid in kind.The reality is that it is difficult to help people. Add to that low pay, impossible workloads, miles of red tape, inadequate training, low prestige, and ungrateful clients.There is moreover, the fact that society does not really understand what the helping professions are all about. |
| WHAT I like best about the zoo is the influence wild animals have on people. In the middle of the city, amid sky-scrapers and clogged streets, people invariably pass each other without a nod. But at the zoo, in the presence of all those wondrous beasts, these same people forget that they are all strangers. When an elephant extends its trunk to a little boy’s outstretched hand, for example, we all find ourselves smiling and chatting and reacting spontaneously. |
| WHAT Is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement. J.K. Galbraith |
| WHAT IS HAPPENING now is an immigration in time; with the people over 40 the migrants into the present age, and the children born in it the natives. Children who have grown up in the Space Age understand things, out of their continuous experience, that adults have to learn. A scientist friend was having a conversation with his on and wasn’t getting anywhere until he realized that he was standing on the earth looking at the moon, and the boy was standing on the moon looking at the earth. There is in fact a deep, new, unprecedented, worldwide generation gap. And unless one is continually assaying the current experience of children as they are growing up, one gets further and further away from them. —Margaret Mead |
| WHAT is more cheerful than an open wood fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those arec the ghosts of the robins and blackbirds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last spring. –Thomas Aldrich |
| WHAT THE Schools Don’t Teach : Schools are aiming too much -at teaching pupils the content of other men’s minds, and too little at training them to discover the capacity of their Own. –R. R. Hancock, PreSident of the Incorporated Society of Headmasters, |
| WHAT thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross. What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee. What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. |
| WHEN “BUNKY'” KNUDESN son of a former General Motors’ president, William Knudsen Kraidsers, was 14 , his father told him he could have a new Chevrolet if he would call at the factory. Thrilled at the prospect, the boy hurried oser. The car seas waiting for several thousand pieces. “It took him a couple of months to assemble the darn thing, he says, “but l finally got it running. |
| WHEN A MAN feels weary or depressed or in pain, just stepping into clear sunshine does something to him. I have felt it often. Sunshine is manifestly more than heat and light and invisible rayseven as the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. It is something subtler, nearer to the spiritual, something close to the quick of life itself. It seems to me that the sun has in some degree the quality of a patriarchal blessing—a bestowal of that special feeling of security that comes through the love of dear parents still living in the old family homestead where one was born and raised. For the sun is truly the birthstead of the whole earth.‘Guy Murchie in Music of the Spheres |
| When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, He is at once universal and unique. His time has arrived. |
| WHEN a political columnist says “every thinking man,” he means himself. When a candidate appeals to “every intelligent voter,” he means everybody who’s going to vote for him. —Franklin Adams |
| WHEN a resolute young fellow steps up to that great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find that the beard comes off in his hand, that it Was only tied on to scare away timid adventurers. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, |
| WHEN A trout rising to a fly gets hooked and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape … In the same way, the human being struggles with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees, and it usually misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one. — |
| WHEN A woman keeps her mouth shut she becomes more attractive. Why? She becomes mysterious. And that’s more compelling than a sexy figure. A girl can wear flat heels, shapeless tweeds and horn-rimmed Classes and just by rationing her words become an absoiute siren. I’ve seen this happen. A woman, I always say, should be like a good suspense film: the more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is. This should be her aim—to create suspense, to let a man discover things about her without her having to tell him. |
| WHEN Abraham Lincoln was a young lawyer practising in the courts of Illinois, he was once engaged on a case in which the lawyer on the other side made a speech to the jury full of wild statements. Lincoln commenced his reply by saying, “My friend who has just spoken to you would be all right if it weren’t for one thing, and I don’t know that you ought to blame him for that, for he can’t help it. What I refer to is his reckless disregard for the truth. You have seen instances of this in his speech to you. Now the reason lies in the constitution of his mind. The moment he begins to talk all his mental operations cease, and he is not responsible. He is, in fact, much like a little steamboat that I saw on the Sangamon River when I was engaged in boating there. This little steamer had a five-foot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, and every time it whistled the engine stopped.” |
| WHEN AMERICAN playwright Clare Boothe Luce, 76, was asked recently, “Do you have any regrets P”she answered, “Yes, I should have been a better person. Kinder. More tolerant. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I remember a girlfriend of mine who had a brain tumour and called me three times to come and see her. I was always too busy, and when she died I was profoundly ashamed. I remember that after 56 years.” C.P.A. |
| When asked by a disciple if there were one single word which could serve as a principle of conduct for life, Confucius replied “Perhaps the word reciprocity will do”. |
| WHEN CHARLIE CHAPLIN met Albert Einstein, he asked the scientist to discuss his theory of relativity. Einstein suggested that it would not be proper to explain it just then. “It would be,” he said, “as if I were to ask you to do some acting for me right now. You probably couldn’t do it.” For the next hour, however, Chaplin expounded in mystical terms on mathematical theories until the confused Einstein was exhausted. The next morning, a messenger brought Einstein a photo of Chaplin, inscribed: “To a great mathematician. I hope you liked my acting.” —Leonard Lyons |
| WHEN GOVERNOR Jerry Brown of California was a Jesuit novice, the novice master rebuked his charges for being too dependent on their morning coffee. He announced that, to encourage the practice of austerity, coffee would no longer be served. Young Brown piped up with this counterargument: let the coffee continue to be served —so that the novices might be free to exercise their power to refuse to drink it. |
| WHEN HERBERT SPENCER insisted that he remained a bachelor only because he was unable to find a suitable bride, friends introduced him to a woman whom they described as hav-ing not only beauty but a great mind. After spending a number of hours in her company the philosopher informed his matchmaking friends that while their candidate was undoubtedly beautiful her qualification stopped there, for “instead of having a great mind, she has a small mind in constant activity.” |
| WHEN HUMORIST James Thurber became blind, he developed an acute and discriminating ear. “It is amazing how you can depend on your ear,” he said.’F’or instance, after a certain couple had left a big party, I remarked,’they’re going to break up.’ Everyone thought I’d lost my mind. People said,why, we have never seen such friendliness and smiling.’ I said, ‘Yes, you looked at them, I heard them.’ They lasted six months after that.”—Henry Brandon, As We Are |
| When I have One foot in The grave I shall tell The Truth about women. I shall tell It, jump into my coffin, pull The lid over me and say, “Do What You like now.” |
| WHEN I HEAR congratulations tendered to a man on his “‘luck”’ in achieving a success—or when I am greeted in similar fashion after a courtroom victory—I am inclined to recall that this type of “luck” usually visits me at 2a.rn. on a cold morning when, redeyed and boneweary, I am poring over law books preparing a case; it never visits me when I’m at the cinema, on a golf course or reclining in an easy chair. |
| WHEN I WAS in college, we had little use for faith, which We defined as “believing something that you know is not true.” It has taken me more than Is years of living to know faith as the basis of action. Without faith, faith in a book of directions, faith in oneself, faith in another’s word, written or spoken, faith in “the souls invincible surmise,” nothing, not even the simplest thing, would be done. From the child who takes his first step to the scientist who spends years in his laboratory testing and proving, the hypothesis he has set up, all creative action is based on faith. The higher and nobler the object or force on which one sets one’s faith, the more daring and effective the action. — Ha rper |
| When I was young, I wanted everything and all at once, until our old Scottish Minister explained things to me like this:One night he dreamed that he saw a new shop in the High street. He went in and saw an Angel behind the counter. Nervously he asked what the shop sold.“Everything your heart desires “ the Angel said.“Then I want peace on earth “ cried the Minister.” And an end to sorrow ,famine and disease”“Just one moment “ smiled the Angel. ”You have’nt quite understood. We don’t sell fruits here. Only seeds”. |
| WHEN LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI was recording the music for Walt Disney’s Fantasia with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, the complex recording set up in the basement of the Academy of Music was declared a fire hazard and work was ordered stopped. On the advice of friends, Stokowski called ]oe Sharfsin, then city solicitor and an ardent music fan. Sharfsin quickly withdrew the stop order and recording proceeded.Later, Stokowski expressed his gratitude and asked, “Now, what can I do for you Sharfsin said jokingly that one of his greatest wishes was to be rich enough to engage Stokowski and the orchestra for a single performance at which he would be the sole audience. Stokowski asked, “When did you have in mind?” Sharfsin answered, “Oh, that’s a long time away.” Stokowski countered, “How about tomorrow at two o’clock . The incredulous Sharfsin appeared at the side door of the Academy of Music the next afternoon, to be escorted by a deputy of the maestro into the hall, empty except for the orchestra and conductor. The maestro turned to make sure Sharfsin was there, raised his arms, and conducted for four hours—all the music of Fantasia just for Joe Sharfsin. in Philadelphia Inquirer |
| WHEN MAHATMA GANDHI was imprisoned in Yervada jail in l923 for his part in the independence struggle, his wife, Kasturba,came to visit him one day. As Gandhi began. talking to her, a jail Warden remained in the room, as required by the regulations.Thinking, however, that the couple could converse more freely if he were not present, the sympathetic official left the roorn.But as soon as the door closed,Gandhi stopped talking.The Warden returned at the end of the visiting period to find the couple still sitting in silence. When he asked why, Gandhi replied: “I understand that the regulations stipulate that a prisoner can talk to a visitor only in the presence of a jail ofificial. When you left, I had to abide by the rules and so could not exchange a Word with my wife. |
| WHEN making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cos. In vital matters, however, such the choice of a mate or a profession, a decision should come from the unconscious. The important decisions of our personal life should be governed the deep inner needs of our nature. —Sigmund Freud |
| WHEN MY father visited me he never asked, “How’s business ?” or. even, “How are the children?” He’d’ pull clippings out his pockets and say angrily, “Did you see that editorial in this morning’s paper? Let’s answer it!” My father was involved in mankind, and that is why he lived into his 80s. A man is like a tree: he’dies on top first. |
| WHEN ONE becomes a father, then one becomes a son. Standing by the cot of one’s own baby, with that world-old pang of compassion and protectiveness towards this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those whn felt just so towards oneself. Then, for the first time, one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling genera-tions of men. —Christopher Morley |
| WHEN PLANNING business meetings or social gatherings, it is useful to know that crowded equals ill tempered—for men, at least. In tight quarters , men will become harsher, more competitive,and more displeased with each other. However, if you have to rq, you can coop women together, and they will react happily. Mixed groups of men and women are not affected either way. Recent psychological research has dramatically discovered some of the effects of space on people by studying jury decisions. An all male jury in a crowded jury room, it was discovered, will pass a severe sentence. In the same jury room, an all—female group will be lenient —more lenient than they would be in a larger room.—Shirley Sloan Fader |
| WHEN POET ROBERT FROST was at college, the fact that he was an individual with an inner life of his own almost banned him from a students’ club. A friend told him that one thing stood in the way of his acceptance: he took long walks by himself in the woods. Being forewarned, he knew how to answer the club committee when they asked him how he spent his time in the woods. Instead of admitting that he was writing poetry, he answered, “Gnawing the bark off trees!”He was accepted. |
| WHEN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was in his lonely exile in San Francisco, skirting the edge of death, he wrote to a friend, “Why does everyone send me sermons? Why doesn’t someone send me gossip?” In that reproachful question Stevenson was speaking for the human race. For news is usually a better boon than advice. There are many times when our minds turn eagerly, not to the issues of civilization, but to the question, “What on earth are the Joneses going to do next?” Gossip has a had name, because so much malice is associated with it. But gossip, in the true and undefiled sense, is nourishment from the good earth of the doings of people. Christian love and gossip stern from the same root; an interest in other people. When that interest is lacking much of the saving salt of life is gone. —Living Without Gloves (Oxford) |
| When should a parent turn over authority to a child ?When the child stops reaching for authority and reaches for responsibility , and not before . |
| WHEN THE UPANISHADS proclaim the great truth “That art thou, “when the Buddha teaches that each human individual has in him the power to grow into a Buddha or a Bodhisattva, when the ]ews say that the “spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,” when Jesus tells his hearers that the Kingdom of Heaven is within them, and when Muhammad affirms that God is nearer to us than the very artery of our neck, they all mean that the most important thing in life is not to be found in anything external to man but in the hidden strata of his thought and feeling. — Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in Recovery of Faith |
| WHEN THOMAS WOLFE was writing Of Time and the River in 1933, he primed himself each morning with quantities of coffee and an unburdening to his typist of his latest difficulty with friend or foe, publisher or landlord. One morning, he told her of returning home at 4 a.m. and hearing desperate sobs as he was getting out his door key. Then he noticed a milk wagon drawn up to the curb; the driver was leaning against his horse and crying, with an arm thrown over the animal’s neck. Wolfe had felt an impulse to say, “Look,brother—can I do anything?” But he turned away and went in. When the typist asked him why, he seemed troubled. “I don’t know,”he said, with his characteristic drive to express his exact feelings. “I just decided it was something personal between him and his horse.”* |
| WHEN WE ENCOUNTER a truly great person we seldom hear him say, “I never have a free moment. “Successful people know that it is only because they have left many unengaged hours in their life that they have been able to attain their full development and found time to help and comfort others |
| WHEN WINSTON CHURCHILL was, told that savants were declaring that, by the year 2100, women would be ruling the world, his rejoinder, with a twinkle, was just one word: “Still? |
| Whenever I hear a man express hatred for any race , I wonder just what it is in themselves they hate so much. You can be always sure of this : You cannot express hatred for anything unless you make use of the supply of hatred within yourself .The only hatred you can express is your own personal possession. To hate is to be enslaved by evil. |
| WHERE FINANCE is concerned, there seem to be three kinds of people. There are the Ants,who enjoy thinking about money and doing sensible things with it; and there are the Grasshoppers, whc hate to think about money, who simply have fun with it as long as it lasts. Then there are the ,LeadFooted Grasshoppers, the group I belong to . We, likewise, would love to jump about in the sun all day but we can’ do it wholeheartedly because of a perverse streak that makes us hate our selves afterwards. Bored with money except for the pleasant things it will buy, we tend to think about it it swashbuckling terms, though our personal finances are usually buckling more than they swash. When this fact is called to our attention we wonder uneasily what happened. |
| Where there is Charity and Wisdom,There is neither fear nor ignorance.Where there is patience and humility,There is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy,There is neither greed nor avarice.Where there is peace or meditation There is neither anxiety nor doubt.St Francis of Assisi |
| WHILE REHEARSING the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in Bombay, conductor Antal Dorati found that the correct tempo and expression of the Indian National Anthem was eluding him. Seeing the conductor of the local Bombay Symphony Orchestra in the audience, he invited him to step on to the podium, stood aside and listened attentively as the piece was played. |
| WHILE talking with a friend recently, I remarked that status symbols are getting hard to come by. A great many people, if they want one badly enough, can have a new car, a fur coat, a boat, a country cottage.. “What’s left,” I asked, “to distinguish a man?” “Manners,” he replied. “Just good manners.” —Bob Myers |
| While there is a chance in the world of you getting through your troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it.If at the end ,your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful. HG Wells. |
| WHITE HOUSE correspondent Helen Thomas writes: I have many memories of White House parties. I remember in particular singer Sarah Vaughan at the end of a memorable evening at the White House during the Johnson era. The popular black singer was the Star performer at the state dinner honouring Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. President Johnson had danced with her twice and Vice President Humphrey had twirled her around the White House foyer, where the marine dance band played for the dinner guests. When the evening was over, she broke into tears and told White House social secretary Bess Abell: “Twenty-five years ago I couldn’t get a room in this town. But tonight I sang at the White House and danced with the President.” |
| WHO CAN WATCH a tree being planted without being deeply moved? It is a ceremony rather than a mere job. It has a gesture about it that is sacramental, for it implies a faith in life and the continuance of life. —Richard Church in Calm October (Heinemann, London) |
| Who is a Master ?A Master is someone who started before you did. He begins from the center and not the fringe.He teaches the essence. When the essence is perceived, he teaches what is necessary to expand the perception. Whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time. This is the source of his unlimited energy…….Opening lines of the book “The dancing Wu Li masters “by Gary Zukav |
| Whoever in middle age attempts to realize the hopes and wishes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own challenges. Goethe |
| Whoever you are, there is some younger person who thinks you are perfect. There is some work that will never be done if you don’t do it. There is someone who would miss you if you were gone. There is a place that you alone can fill.” |
| WHO’ll KNOW if We Fill the Chinks? Years ago as a young lad I was helping an old man to build a section of wall on a hillside slope of a farmyard. For almost two centuries Old Ben’s family had been famous dry-wall builders. Old Ben was the last of the line. We had dug the trench wide and deep, three feet or more, so that the big foundation stones would be below the frost-line. Slowly the wall rose. The old man was very particular about each rock and chinking piece. To an impatient lad the old craftsman was unconscionably slow. The idea of chinking rocks below the soil surface was particularly irksome. “Who’s going to know if these are chinked or not?” was a boy’s question. The old man’s astonishment was genuine as he peered over his spectacles, “Why,” he said, “I will—and ‘so will you.” |
| Why do Insurance Companies, when they want to describe an act of God, pinch on something which sounds an act of devil ?One would think that God was exclusively concerned with making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts and dry rot.They seem to forget that HE also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom and siamese kittens. |
| WHY SHOULD it be more embarrassing to be caught talking to yourself than singing to yourself, which many people love to do? And certainly, if you’re not on speaking terms with yourself, you need to do something about it. —Rachel Peden: in The Land, the People |
| Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism ?If a mans work is easy to understand an explanation is unnecessary.(In The critic as an artist) |
| WILLARD BUTCHER, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, on bureaucrvatic regulations: I would like to see government adopt a goals oriented approach to regulation. Instead of telling us how to do things, tell us what it wants accomplished. In the eighteenth century HC , Babylonian King Hammurabi had a simple building regulation that if a house collapsed and killed the occupant, the builder would be executed. While this may be a bit harsh by today’s standards, the law rightfully set goals rather than the means of reaching them. |
| WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE:American writer and newspaper editor: I have never been bored an hour in my life. I get up every morning wondering what new, strange, glamorous thing is going to happen, and it happens at fairly regular intervals. Lady Luck has been good to me. fancy she has been good to many. Only some people are dour, and when she gives them the come hither with her eyes, they look down or turn away. But me — I give her the wink, and away we go. —A Treasury of Contentment, edited by Ralph Woods |
| WILLIAM BOLITHO: the most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence, and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool. —Dale Carnegie |
| WILLIAM FAULKNER, when asked to describe his ideal woman : Well, I couldn’t describe her by colour of hair or colour of eyes, because once she is described, then somehow she vanishes. The ideal woman which is in every man’s mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree. —Lion in the Gorden, |
| William Feather Too many of us wait to do the ‘perfect thing with the result that we do nothing. The way to .get ahead is to start now. While many of us are waiting until conditions are “just right” before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time that we, in our superior wisdom, decide to make a start, we discover that the fools, in their blundering way, have travelled a considerable distance, If you start now, you will know a lot, next. year that yod don’t know now and that you will not know next year if you wait. |
| WINSTON CHURCHILL’S humour is not of the polished variety; it smacks much more of the music hall. In 1939 when he was First Lord of the Admiralty he told with relish how a destroyer had dropped a depth charge, but instead of finding a submarine, bits of an old wreck had come to the surface. “And would you believe it,” he added with a grin, “there was a door bobbing about with my initials on it ! I wanted to recount this important occurrence in a speech, but Mr. Chamberlain cut it out—he thinks my taste is questionable.” —Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill: the Era and the Man (Hamish Hamilton) |
| WINSTON CHURCHIL., when still a young man, gave this advice : First impressions are often original and always valuable. You should try and put them down on paper—not necessarily for publication, but as a practice in good composition. The art of observing is one which can be cultivated; it is an excellent thing to try and see the odd, queer and unnoticed side of things. —Randolph Churchill |
| With health everything is a source of pleasure.Without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable.It follows that the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness : For gain, advancement, learning, or fame …let alone fleeting sensual pleasures. |
| WITH THE public eye more steadily fixed upon them than ever before, all politicians should be readier to heed Will Rogers’ advice: “Live your life so you won’t be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” Elliot Richardson in The Creative Balance |
| WITHIN the atom, electrons revolve round their nucleus several thousand million times a second. Each electron has as much room to move within the atom as a bee has to move in St.Paul’s Cathedral. |
| WOMEN, while they on occasion enjoy lies and even at times demand them, can see them sticking up out of man’s conversation like rocks in a sea. —H. V. Morton in In Search of Ireland |
| Wonderful , how a certain novelist can drape an arm around the reader and sort of whisper into his ear ….. While stepping on his foot.Arthur Miller |
| WORK TODAY has lost many traditional characteristics; so has play.Play has increasingly been transformed into organized sports, and sports, in turn, increasingly resemble work in the arduous practice and preparation, in the intense involvement of coaches and athletes (in the spirit of work), and in actual economic productivity. In a final paradox, only those sports which began as work—that is, hunting and fishing—are now dominated by the spirit of play.—John Talamini and Charles Page in Sport and Society |
| Writers have no real area of expertise.They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.Lorrie Moore |
| YEARS ago, someone said that economics is the science of stating the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible. Economics is not incomprehensible, as some schoolchildren know. And what it teaches is certainly not obvious, for otherwise there would be no problem of economic illiteracy. We can—and must—learn our economic ABC’s, for at bottom the case for economics is the case for democracy itself —government by the people. If a democracy is to cope effectively with economic issues, the people must understand. |
| You , who have read the history of nations from Moses down to our last election …..Where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another ? EL Stanton |
| You can judge a leader by the size of the problem he tackles. People nearly always pick a problem their own size, and ignore or leave to others bigger or smaller ones. Anthony Jay. |
| YOU CAN’T control the length of your life, but can control its width and depth. You can’t control the weather ,but you can control the moral atmosphere that surrounds you. You can’t control the other fellows annoying faults, but you can see to it that you do not develop and harbor provoking propensities. You can’t control hard times but you can bank money now to boost you through. |
| YOU DO NOT have to ignore problems in order to be happy, but you need to remind yourself constantly that the insurmountable difficulties of today are the solved problems of tomorrow. -Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, |
| You save a lot of unnecessary conversation if you remember that people aren’t going to take your advice unless you are a lawyer or a doctor and charge them for it |
| YOU SHOW a child what has once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness. —J. B. Priestley |
| YOUNG people searching for their real self” must learn that the real self is not something one finds as much as it is something one makes ; and it is one’s daily actions that shape the inner personality far more permanently than any amount of introspection or intellection. |
| YOUR body knows infinitely more than the combined wisdom of all the scientists in the world.. Take biochemistry as a case in point. In the most uptodate laboratory, the typical protein must boil for a minimum of 24 hours in a chemical solution to be broken down thoroughly. The chemical system in your body completes’ the identical job in only four hours—and without high temperatures. |
| YOU’VE always been told not to doubt. But I tell you, doubt! Doubt is the sheet anchor of intelligence, the waterline of the reasonable being. Doubt is at the very base of knowledge, since it is the essential condition of the pursuit of the truth “JeanCharles Harvey, |
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