Upon a Thought: words of wisdom

Quotes to Ponder

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
-- e. e. cummings

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams."
-- Unknown

"Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds."
-- Albert Einstein

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm!"
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
--G. K. Chesterton

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."
-- John Quincy Adams

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness."
-- Edith Sitwell

"It is our choices....that show who we really are, far more then our abilities."
-- J.K. Rowling

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
-- Edgar Allan Poe

"I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself."
-- Rita Mae Brown

"I wish they would only take me as I am."
-- Vincent Van Gogh

"Life is not about learning how to avoid the storms. It's about learning how to dance in the rain."
-- Anonymous

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
-- Edmund Burke

"Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. "
-- Anonymous

"It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are."
-- Roy Disney

"[My] principal goal [in] education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done."
--Jean Piaget

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. "
-- Anatole France

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more wisely."
-- Anonymous

"Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?"
-- Marian Wright Edelman

"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world."
--Jane Addams

"Evil is like a shadow. It has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it."
-- Shakti Gawain

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain."
-- Helen Keller

"To be great is to be misunderstood."
-–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
-–Juan Ramon Jimenez

My darling girl, when are you going to understand that “normal” isn’t a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.
-–Stockard Channing

"Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you."
--Saint Augustine

"Do the common thing in an uncommon way."
-–Booker T. Washington

"From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw."
-–Edgar Allan Poe

"From now on, I’ll connect the dots my own way!"
-–Bill Watterson

"I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don’t."
-–Tim Burton

"It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation."
--Stanley Milgram

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. "
--Confucius

"Hear the other side."
--Saint Augustine

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it."
--G. K. Chesterton

"Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it."

"I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things."

“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
--Oscar Wilde

Wednesday

Pockets

Recent words of wisdom from my Intro to Ethics prof, who has been known to say some amusingly profound things purely by accident....

[He can be slightly scatterbrained. He set an assignment down on a back table and forgot about it, couldn't find it, and then eventually located it halfway through the class, causing him to remark...]

"Ah, the table. Pockets and tables are very challenging for me. I should be a man with only one pocket and live in a place with only one table, and then everything would be where I thought."

But if you ask me, pockets are what keep life interesting! Is there a feeling more lovely in the world than pulling out your favorite jeans for the first time in the fall, reaching into one of the many pockets and finding a wrinkled $10 bill, just waiting to surprise you and make your day, because you forgot that you put it in that pocket last Spring? I think that "EUREKA!" moment is like no other!

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