Inspiration Peek

Quotes About LIGHT

2011-08-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

Just when we had crossed the road, Richard was the one who told us that the Traffic Lights were normal again. But when we need to cross the road, all the traffic lights did not function...

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~Joseph Campbell

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't. ~Blaise Pascal

Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. ~H.M. Tomlinson

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. ~ Thomas Elva Edison

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. ~ Chinese Proverb

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

You've got to chase your dreams. ~ Earvin "Magic" Johnson

I would rather start a family than finish one. ~ Don Marquis

To us, Family means putting your arms around each other and being there. ~ Barbara Bush

All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within. ~ Horace Friess

Life is like riding a bicycle, you don't fall off unless you plan to stop peddling. ~ Claude Pepper

Friendship is one mind in two bodies. ~ Mencius

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Every artist was first an amateur. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light? ~Maurice Freehill

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. ~Chinese Proverb

We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light. ~Mary Dunbar

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. ~Edith Wharton

The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light. ~Felix Adler

LIGHT Quotes

2011-07-31T01:27:00.000-07:00

Imagine a world without lights. When darkness falls, we would not be able to see. This is a traffic junction which our family always use. The use of colours as in traffic lights, had enabled orderliness. On a busy road, the traffic light is a common tool of communication. When the traffic light spoils, as in the case above, WHO would want to give way?

Give light and people will find their own way.

Light is good from whatever lamp it shines.

Impatience never commanded success. ~ Edwin H Chapin

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. ~ Francis Bacon

When anger rises, think of the consequences. ~ Confucius

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one. ~ Benjamin Franklin

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Either you run the day or the day runs you. ~ Jim Rohn

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. ~ Albert Einstein

You learn as much from those who have failed as from those who have succeeded. ~ Michael Johnson

The shell must break before the bird can fly. ~ Tennyson

The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in the service of others. ~ Gandhi

We get to make a living; we give to make a life. ~ Winston Churchill

Kindness is a language which the dumb can speak, the deaf can understand. ~ C.N Bovee

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. ~ Winston Churchill

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. ~ Ann Landers

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. ~ Walter Winchell

A quarrel between friends, when made up, adds a new tie to friendship. ~ St Francis De Sales

You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you've collected a lot of empty yesterdays. ~ Professor Harold Hill (The Music man)

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding. ~ Andre Gide

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. ~ Samuel Johnson

He who cannot light a fire knows nothing about love. ~ Finnish Proverb

Light is the symbol of truth. ~ James Russell Lowell

Quotations About The Soul II

2009-03-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

Unless your heart, your soul, and your whole being are behind every decision you make, the words from your mouth will be empty, and each action will be meaningless. Truth and confidence are the roots of happiness.

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. ~Lao Tzu

Imagination is the eye of the soul. ~Joseph Joubert

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals. ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul. ~ Bram Stoker

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness. ~ Albert Einstein

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. ~ Saint Augustine quotes

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. ~ Oscar Wilde

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you? ~ Khalil Gibran

The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhaused all illusions. ~ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

What is soul? It's like electricity -- we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room. ~Ray Charles

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body. ~Cicero

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. ~Anatole France

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear. ~Daniel Defoe, The Education of Women

Love is a gift of one's inner most soul to another so both can be whole.

Quotations About The Soul I

2009-03-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul.

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods. ~ Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

A house is a home when it shelters the body and comforts the soul. ~ Phillip Moffitt

Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form ... you can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul. ~ John O'Donouhue

Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Soul shadows you everywhere. ~Anda Fiori

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. ~Mark Twain

Emotions are the colors of the soul. ~ Paul Young

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul. ~Plato

Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul. ~Geoffrey Fisher

Each flower is a soul blossoming out to nature. ~ Gerard de Nerval

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul is healed by being with children. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Friends will keep you sane, Love could fill your heart, A lover can warm your bed, but lonely is the soul without a mate. ~ David Pratt

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. ~ Oscar Wilde

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

Excerpt From Life Of Sir Stamford Raffles II

2008-08-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

Among the men who have established the political and commercial power of this country in the seas of India and China, no one would deny a foremost place to Stamford Raffles. This silent acquiescence is the tribute paid by national gratitude to the greatness of a name, when the precise nature of the man's work has been consigned to oblivion, or perhaps never appreciated. But the work in this case was an achievement well worth description for its own value, and not less noteworthy because accomplished by a humble individual in the teeth of personal prejudice and official opposition. Raffles owed nothing to favour or fortune; he was the architect of his own position and reputation; while the breadth of his views and the boldness of his deeds often brought him the censure of his narrow-minded and faint-hearted superiors. But the difficulties and malice which nearly crushed him during life enhance his posthumous fame, and to him will ever be given the chief, if not the sole, credit of instituting the measures which permanently assured our hold on the sea route to the Far East.

Excerpt From Life Of Sir Stamford Raffles - Clouds and Death

Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, to give him his full name, was the only son of Benjamin Raffles, who at the time of his famous son's birth, was captain of a merchant vessel trading between London and the West Indies.

Thus closed suddenly, and under the shadow of ill-health, pecuniary losses, and personal disappointment, the career of Sir Stamford Raffles. In years he had only just entered the period of middle life, and the work he had performed, as well as the experience he had gained, would have entitled him to take a further prominent part in the affairs of the East. Had his life been prolonged, there can be little doubt that he would have won fresh fame as a statesman on the floor of the House of Commons, or as an administrator in some new station beyond the seas. He had done enough, however, in his brief, and almost meteroic career, to obtain a place among the few great intellects and brave spirits that have pointed out for this country the path to empire in Southern Asia. Opposition, prejudice, aclumny during his lifetime and since his death, forgetfulness, and the haste which prevents our realising that our Empire came to us by inheritance from our forefathers, have not undone his work or diminished his reputation.

What was his work? Let the reader throw back his mind and consider all that Raffles had done, written, and inspired in the twenty-one years between the day on which he left the home-country, a young man, serious but hopeful, half-educated, he said in his modesty, but employing his time on ship-board in learning Malay, resolute to succeed by his own merit, but still more resolute to promote the interests of England -- and that early summer morning when his wife found him dead by the foot of the stairs at Highwood. His rise in the official service of the Company was extraordinarily rapid.

The marvel is that his detractors were so few; and great must have been the merit, subtle must have been the charm of manner, that at that period disarmed the enmity of the privileged ranks of the services and made so many of them his friends and admirers. His success, the resolution with which he carried his own views and policy into effect, were the more remarkable, because he never put on the hollow aspect of humility, so often used as a screen for ambition.

Such was the spirit in which he accomplished his life's mission. Sanguine in temperament, quick in his judgment, fixed in his resolutions, courageous in the execution of his plans, and undaunted in the face of difficulty, Raffles revealed on all critical occasions those qualities which are essential to the man of action, whether he be a statesman or a soldier.

The founding of Singapore was a great achievement -- great by reason of the method and the attendant conditions of its accomplishment. It was also a definite and concrete performance which everyone can see and understand. But, after all, this single act was not the real claim of Stamford Raffles to rank in the front group of English statesmen.

We may well ask ourselves in conclusion, whether in these days of checks and counter-checks upon individual initiative, when democratic institutions and interdependent councils combine with the telegraph to render it difficult to fasten responsibility on any one short of some ill-defined central authority, it is possible for such men as Stamford Raffles to obtain and to turn to account the opportunities that fall to their lot for the national aggrandisement. And if the individual statesman and soldier cannot obtain the chance, how is this Empire to be carried on, how are the triumphs of the past to be repeated in the future history of the world? With, however, the example and career fresh in our minds of this great man, this buoyant English statesman, who would have said, in the words of Shakespeare, "Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them," doubt and fear would be out of place. Not of such as Raffles was Tennyson's mind full when he wrote the lines --

"Pray God our greatness may not fail
Through craven fears of being great."

Excerpt From Life Of Sir Stamford Raffles I

2008-08-17T22:51:00.000-07:00

Excerpt From Life Of Sir Stamford Raffles - Clouds and Death

Raffles had never been physically a strong man, and the little strength he possessed had been so sapped by the sustained and indefatigable labours which he undertook in the course of his public duty, that it is not surprising to find that his health was bad, and a constant source of anxiety to his relatives after his final return in 1824. He had never complained at that time of the effect of that climate which proved fatal to his first wife, his children, and his best friends -- one after another; but, none the less, it told its tale on him. It was not merely in repeated attacks of illness that this was shown, but in the difficulty of writing. His hand became cramped, and he suffered from pains in the head. His active and comprehensive mind was full of great schemes, but he had not the physical strength to carry them out.

There is no doubt that Sir Stamford Raffles was a man of a delicate and sensitive mind, as well as of a precarious constitution.

The story of the last eighteen months of the life of Sir Stamford Raffles is a sad one; and there has seldom, if ever, been a case of a man, who had done so much for his country, passing away under such a cloud of varied misfortunes as befell him, without a contributory act of his own. His courage and eagle spirit would no doubt have enabled him to bear up under these trials, and to have triumphed, as he had done before, over all opponents; but successive attacks, premonitory of the malady that killed him, sapped his vigour, and exhausted, with each fresh effort, the remaining powers of his body.

The following extracts from his correspondence with Dr Raffles will show the reader how much he suffered during the last year of his life. On the 24th May 1825, he wrote: "Thank God I can return a tolerably satisfactory answer to your kind inquiry by saying, that though still rather weak and nervous, I am again getting about. My attack was sudden and unexpected, but fortunately was not apoplectic, as was at first feared. I was inanimate for about an hour, but on being bled, got better, and have had no return"; and again on 6th June, he wrote:"This last attack has so shaken my confidence and nerves, that I have hardly spirit at the present moment to enter upon public life, and prudence dictates the necessity of my keeping as quiet as I can until I completely re-establish my health." On the 10th Novemeber in the same year, he wrote:"I have been confined to my bed the whole of the day with one of my most violent headaches", and on the 7th February 1826 he said,"I have, upon the whole, very much improved in my general health than I have enjoyed since my return to England... I have, however, had, and still have, a good many annoyances and inquietudes, which have occasionally disturbed my peace of mind, owing to the misconduct and distresses of friends; but I hope these will soon be over."

The Gentleman's Magazine, for July 1826, gives the following particulars of Sir Stamford's death, which occurred early in the morning of the 5th of that month, the day before his forty-fifth birthday,"He had passed the preceding day in the bosom of his family, and excepting a bilious attack under which he had laboured for some days, there was ntohing in his appearance to create the least apprehension that the fatal hour was so near. Sir Stamford had retired to rest on the Tuesday evening (4th July) between ten and eleven o'clock, his usual hour when in the country. On the following morning at 5 0'clock, it being discovered that he had left his room before the time at which he generally rose, 6 0'clock, Lady Raffles immediately rose, and found him lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs in a state of complete insensibility. Medical aid was promptly procured, and every means resorted to, to restore animation, but the vital spark had fled. The body was opened, under the direction of Sir Everard Home, the same day, who pronounced his death to have been caused by an apoplectic attack, beyond the control of all human power. It was likewise apparent that the sufferings of the decesased must, for some time past, have been most intense." In the course of an appreciative notice the writer concludes as follows:" Considered as a whole, the character of the late Sir T. Stamford Raffles displays little, if anything, to censure, and much to applaud. His name will live in British History, not among warriors, but among the benefactors of mankind, as a philanthropist and statesman of the very first eminence."

Quotation About Reading V

2008-07-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man:
nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish;
civilization grow old and die out; new races build 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

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
~ Emily Dickinson

If I read a book that impresses me,
I have to take myself firmly in hand,
before I mix with other people;
otherwise they would think my
mind rather queer. ~ Anne Frank

The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

Never judge a book by its movie. ~ J. W. Eagan

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island. ~ Walt Disney

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. ~ Umberto Eco

Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. ~ Desiderius Erasmus

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~ Charles W. Eliot

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests;
just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep,
for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
~ Paxton Hood

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.
~ Harold Howe

The proper study of mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley

Quotation About Reading IV

2008-07-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water. ~ Mark Twain

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ~ Mark Twain

The great American novel has not only already been written,
it has already been rejected. ~ Frank Dane

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. ~ Albert Camus

The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

When we read a story, we inhabit it.
The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape.
It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. ~ Arthur Christopher Benson

A truly great book should be read in youth,
again in maturity and once more in old age,
as a fine building should be seen by morning light,
at noon and by moonlight.
~ Robertson Davies

The way a book is read- which is to say,
the qualities a reader brings to a book-
can have as much to do with its worth
as anything the author puts into it. ~ Norman Cousins

The book salesman should be honored
because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very
books we need most and neglect most. ~ Frank Crane

It was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other
way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of
their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong
hand to keep them down. ~ Agatha Christie

Quotation About Books III

2008-07-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits,
-- so much help
By so much reading. it is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth --
'T is then we get the right good from a book.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment,
but in which each thought is of unusual daring;
such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution --
such call I good books.
~ Henry David Thoreau

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many
predictions of times in which it will rain.
But press those books as strongly as you can,
you can not get out of them a drop of water.
So you can not get out of all the books that contain
the best precepts the smallest good deed.
~ Count Leo Tolstoy

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.
Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it,
whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects
of his inner self that are opened by the text,
that road cut through the interior jungle forever
closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement
of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming,
whereas the copier submits it to command.
~ Walter Benjamin

A conventional good read is usually a bad read,
a relaxing bath in what we know already.
A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we,
the readers, become conspirators.
~ Malcolm Bradbury

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested:
that is, some books are to be read only in parts,
others to be read, but not curiously, and some few
to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
~ Francis Bacon

Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands
two new approaches to the written word.
First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information,
by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore.
Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by
reading faster and with greater comprehension.
~ Jimmy Calano

Readers may be divided into four classes:
1.) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in
nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2.) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get
through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3.) Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4.) Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by
what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that
while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed,
has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too,
and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
~ Marina Tsvetaeva

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...
What really knocks me out is a book that,
when you're all done reading it,
you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours
and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
That doesn't happen much, though.
~ J. D. Salinger

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help;
to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail;
to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own,
and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges
and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
~ John Ruskin

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work
to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum
of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they
go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger
the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
~ Salman Rushdie

Quotation About Books II

2008-07-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room
piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out
among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse
between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats
of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first.
And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark.
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A book is good company.
It is full of conversation without loquacity.
It comes to your longing with full instruction,
but pursues you never.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. ~ Louisa May Alcott

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger

There is no past, so long as book shall live! ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear. ~ E.S. Barrett

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. ~ Dawn Adams

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. ~ Coolio

I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. ~ Scott Corbett

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~ Samuel Butler

In books lies the soul of the whole past time. ~ Thomas Carlyle

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been -- it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please. ~ Oswald Chambers

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules,
without words or anger, without bread or money.
If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them,
they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold;
if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
~ Richard De Bury

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend,
a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.
By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently
divert and pleasantly entertain himself,
as in all weathers, as in all fortunes. ~ Barrow

Quotation About Books

2008-07-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

People die, but books never die.

Beware of the man of one book. ~ Thomas Aquinas

There is no friend as loyal as a book. ~ Ernest Hemingway

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. ~ Joseph Addison

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~ Chinese proverb

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind. ~ Robert Chambers

A good title is the title of a successful book. ~ Raymond Chandler

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Marcus T. Cicero

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book. ~ Thomas Kempis

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions. ~ Christopher Dawson

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future. ~ Jim Bishop

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is. ~ Allan Bloom

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Books are not men and yet they stay alive. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. ~ John Harington

Quotation About Reading III

2008-07-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering
a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills.
Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle
or the intricacies of close order drill "by the numbers,"
recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound
by sound and word by word.
~ Jacquelyn Gross

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different
dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different
books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food
in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
~ Sydney Smith

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Richard Steele

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading. ~ Laurence Sterne

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~ Alvin Toffler

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The successful Accelerated Reader is able to read larger than normal "blocks" or "bites" of the printed page with each eye stop. He has accepted, without reservation, the philosophy that
the most important benefit of reading is the gaining of information, ideas, mental "picture" and entertainment -- not the fretting over words. He has come to the realization that words
in and of themselves are for the most part insignificant. ~ Wade E. Cutler

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready,
and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. ~ E. M. Forster

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one
on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ~ Virginia Woolf

Choose an author as you choose a friend. ~ Sir Christopher Wren

When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day. ~ Jean Fritz

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. ~ Anne Tyler

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. ~ Atwood H. Townsend

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

Quotation About Reading II

2008-07-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. ~ Augustine Birrell

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers. ~ Steven Spielberg

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.
If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. ~ Maya Angelou

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. ~ William Faulkner

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story.
And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. ~ John Berger

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Lord Henry P. Brougham

There is creative reading as well as creative writing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. ~ Emilie Buchwald

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. ~ Edmund Burke

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading. ~ Rufus Choate

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers. ~ William Cobbett

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff. ~ Jim Critchfield

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~ Albert Einstein

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. ~ John Locke

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. ~ Hazel Rochman

Quotation About Reading I

2008-07-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Read in order to live. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

Learn as much by writing as by reading. ~ Lord Acton

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. ~ W. Fusselman

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Joseph Addison

I am a part of everything that I have read. ~ John Kieran

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. ~ Anthony Marcel

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first? ~ George Bernard Shaw

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare. ~ Harriet Martineau

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. ~ Holbrook Jackson

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander. ~ Isaac Asimov

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing. ~ Isaac Disraeli

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. ~ Francis Bacon

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. ~ Joseph Addison

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. ~ Katherine Mansfield

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Lord Henry P. Brougham

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. ~ Aneurin Bevan

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers. ~ Stan Barstow

Quotation About Books & Reading

2008-07-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. ~ Austin Phelps

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. ~ B. F. Skinner

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end.
You should live several lives while reading it. ~ William Styron

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book. ~ Stephane Mallarme

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
~ Henry David Thoreau

One half who graduate from college never read another book.
~ Herbert True

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you,
and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--
such is a pleasure beyond compare. ~ Yosida Kenko

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most.
The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading;
but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of
thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
~ Theodore Parker

It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own.
~ Katherine Paterson

Upon books the collective education of the race depends;
they are the sole instruments of registering,
perpetuating and transmitting thought.
~ Henry C. Rogers

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what?
All you have to do is go to the library. ~ Jim Rohn

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
~ John Ruskin

A library is thought in cold storage. ~ Herbert Samuel

The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss

More Quotes

Self-Protrait (David Whyte)

2008-06-25T02:55:00.000-07:00

Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM), House of Prayer and Formation,no.49, Holland Road.

SELF-PORTRAIT
By David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eye,
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

Self-Protrait is a poem David Whyte(1955) wrote after looking in the mirror one morning -- 'something' was calling him to stand up, wake up, and be honest about what his life was needing him to be and do. The whole theme of Whyte's poem is authenticity. David whyte was born and raised in the north of England, studied marine zoology in Wales, and trained as a naturalist in the Galapagos Islands. He now lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two children, and works full-time as a poet, reading and lecturing throughout the world. He is one of the few poets to bring his insights to bear on organizational life, working with corporations at home and abroad. He has published four volumes of poetry, and has also written two best-selling prose books.

The Road Not Taken

2008-06-24T03:06:00.000-07:00

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

"The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 in his collection Mountain Interval. It is the first poem in the volume, and the first poem Frost had printed in italics. The title is often misremembered as The Road Less Traveled, from the penultimate line: “I took the one less traveled by”.

In Silence (Thomas Merton)

2008-06-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

In Silence
By Thomas Merton

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are You? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of

What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

"I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on Fire?"

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist Monk, poet and peace activist. He was one of the first Christian monks to take an active interest in the spiritual traditions of the East. He was especially drawn to Buddhism because of its profound understanding of the human mind, and its placing of spirituality in the recesses of the human heart, rather than in outer forms and rituals. Merton was not only a monk but also a prolific, bestselling author and a gifted poet. In this extraordinary poem "In Silence", Merton tells us that even the stones speak, that they know who we are, and that they will tell us if we can be still enough to hear them. The universe, then, is alive with an intelligence that mirrors the light of knowledge that lives in us. Not the information in our frontal lobes, but the intelligence of the heart's deep core. If we can be still enough -- an that if is everything -- Merton says we might hear the stones speak our own true Name.

In 1947, his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a surprise best-seller, and profoundly influenced the immediate postwar interest in monasticism and religion. In the sixties, he became one of the first authoritative Christian voices to take a serious interest in Eastern spirituality, especially Buddhism. He translated Buddhist poets, and in 1968 attended an interfaith meeting of monastic superiors in Bangkok. On that same journey, he met the Dalai Lama in India, and they recognized each other as kindred spirits. Tragically, Merton was electrocuted accidentally in his Bangkok hotel room, and died there.

Quotations About Change

2008-05-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.

Whoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season. ~ Heraclitus/Heraklietos of Ephesos

There are three kinds of people: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who ask, "What happened?" ~ Casey Stengel

Concerning all acts of iniative and creation, there is one elementary truth- that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. ~ W.H. Murray, The Story of Everest

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ~Charles Darwin

The best way to predict the future is to create it. ~ Peter Drucker

The most powerful agent of growth and transformation is something much more basic than any technique: a change of heart. ~ John Welwood

Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat. ~ Caroline Schoeder

It's best to make your peace with change, before it makes pieces of you. With the beginning of a great & compassionate love, comes the growth of one's heart, and with that, a profound inner change. The way to opening the mind is often first through the heart. And once is the mind & heart are open, so many things become possible. ~ Corey Irwin

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. ~Henri Bergson

We know only two things about the future: It cannot be known, and it will be different from what exists now and from what we now expect. ~ Peter Drucker

The mind thinks That any change Is painful. The heart feels That any change Is powerful. ~ Sri Chinmoy

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstacy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed. ~ I. Krishnamurti

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain. ~ Maya Angelou

You want to change the world. The world wants to change you. You and the world Should stop thinking of changing each other. Just allow a third Person To do the needful. You know who I mean: God the only Doer. ~ Sri Chinmoy

We cannot discover new oceans until we have the courage to lose sight of the shore. ~ Muriel Chen

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. ~ African proverb

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

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. ~ Henri Bergson

Learn wisdom from the ways of a seedling. A seedling which is never hardened off through stressful situations will never become a strong productive plant. ~ Stephen Sigmund

Quotes About Heroism

2008-05-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

Hero - Mariah Carey (Cats Video)

A hero is a man who does what he can. ~ Romain Rolland

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men. ~Plato

It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes. ~ Louis Pasteur

By hero, we tend to mean a heightened man who, more than other men, possesses qualities of courage, loyalty, resourcefulness, charisma, above all, selflessness. He is an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect his society's values, sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community. ~ Paul Zweig

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer. ~ Novalis

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot be a hero without being a coward. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. ~ Umberto Eco

The hero is the man dedicated to the creation and / or defense of reality-conforming, life-promoting values. ~ Andrew Bernstein

Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes. ~Benjamin Disraeli

The most heroic word in all languages is revolution. ~ Eugene Debs

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule. ~ Miguel de Unamuno

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh, that is to say over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of illness, of loneliness and of death. There is no real piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious con. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. ~ Thomas Merton

Hero worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poem: The Happy Warrior

2008-03-03T22:00:00.000-08:00

The Happy Warrior

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
-- It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature`s highest dower;
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives:
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate;
Is placable -- because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
-- `Tis he whose law is reason; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence, in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
He labours good on good to fix, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows:
-- Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire,
And in himself possess his own desire;
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state,
Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall,
Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
Whose power shed round him in the common strife,
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover; and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw:
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need:
-- He who, though thus endued as with a sense
And faculty for storm and turbulence,
Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;
Sweet images! which, wheresoe`er he be,
Are at his heart; and such fidelity
It is his darling passion to approve;
More brave for this, that he hath much to love: -
`Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high,
Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye,
Or left unthought-of in obscurity, --
Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not --
Plays, in the many games of life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won:
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray;
Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpast;
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever, and to noble deeds give birth,
Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name --
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause:
This is the happy Warrior; this is He
That every Man in arms should wish to be.

By William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 - 23 April 1850)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads(1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Poem: Opportunity

2008-03-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

Opportunity

Master of human destinies am I.
Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait,
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and passing by
Hovel and mart and palace -- soon or late
I knock, unbidden, once at every gate!
If sleeping, wake -- if feasting, rise before
I turn away. It is the hour of fate,
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe
Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury, and woe,
Seek me in vain and uselessly implore --
I answer not, and I return no more.

by John James Ingalls (29 December 1833 - 16 July 1900)

John James Ingalls was born in Middleton, Massachusetts. He was a well-known lawyer and journalist, but became active in politics and served for many years in the United States Senate. He is remembered for the sonnet, "Opportunity".

John James Ingalls graduated from Williams College in 1855. Foreshadowing his later reputation as a wit, his graduation thesis, entitled Mummy Life, was a satire of college life. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1857. Moving to Kansas Territory, Ingalls settled in Atchison in 1860. He joined the anti-slavery forces and worked to make Kansas a free state. He was a member of the Wyandotte constitutional convention in 1859 and is reputed to have coined the state motto, Ad Astra per Aspera.

When Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861, he became secretary of the first state Senate and state senator in 1862. During the Civil War he served as judge advocate in the Kansas militia. As an editor of the Atchison newspaper, Freedom's Champion, for three years, he won a national reputation for a series of magazine articles. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1873, succeeding Samuel C. Pomeroy, Ingalls served for 18 years. He supported labor and agriculture against monopolies. He also favored the Interstate Commerce Act and the Civil Service Law (US).

In 1887 Ingalls was elected president pro tempore of the Senate. Praised throughout his life for his keen sarcasm and quick wit, John James Ingalls died in East Las Vegas, New Mexico, on August 16, 1900.

In 1905, the state of Kansas donated a marble statue of Ingalls to the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection This statue is slated to be replaced by Amelia Earhart.

Quotation About Burden

2008-03-01T02:45:00.000-08:00

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it. ~ Lena Home

It's easier traveling the road of life when I don't have so much to carry on my back.
~ Silas Weir Mitchell

God gave burdens, also shoulders. ~ Yiddish Proverb

He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden. ~ Plato

If your strength is small, don't carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don't give advice. ~ Chinese Proverb

Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found. ~ Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)

A sacred burden is this life ye bear: Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly, Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly. Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin, But onward, upward, till the goal ye win. ~ Frances Anne Kemble

A buffalo does not feel the weight of its own horns. ~ Indian Proverb

Nuclear waste is a heavy burden to lay on our children and their children and their children's children and their children's children's children and their children's children's children's children... ~ Rufina M. Laws

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden. ~ St. Augustine

I have reached zero tolerance for the cruelty against our animal brothers. If we are to nurture our culture, let’s begin with the animals who have been nothing but our beasts of burden for so long. ~ Riki Rockett

Forgiveness is primarily for our own sake, so that we no longer carry the burden of resentment. But to forgive does not mean we will allow injustice again. ~ Jack Kornfield

None knows the weight of another's burden. ~ George Herbert

Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden. ~ Hosea Ballou

I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back. ~ Phillips Brooks

More Quotes About Burden

Persian Proverb

2008-02-11T01:49:00.000-08:00

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If the teacher be corrupt, the world will be corrupt.

If fortune turns against you, even jelly breaks your tooth.

If one has to jump a stream and knows how wide it is, he will not jump. If he does not knwo how wide it is, he will jump, and six times out of ten he will make it.

One pound of learning requires ten pounds of common sense to apply it.

Taking the first step with the good thought, the second with the good word, and the third with the good deed, I enter paradise.

The best memory is that which forgets nothing but injuries. Write kindness in marble and write injuries in the dust.

Luck is infatuated with the efficient.

No lamp burns till morning.

Thinking is the essence of wisdom.

Use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.

Walls have mice and mice have ears.

What is brought by the wind will be carried away by the wind.

Whatever you sow, you reap.

Whatever is in the heart will come up to the tongue.

When the cat and mouse agree, the grocer is ruined.

The best mode of instruction is to practise what we preach.

The best of friends must part.

The best of men are but men at best.

The blind man is laughing at the bald head.

The doctor must heal his own bald head.

The loveliest of faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

The wise man sits on the hole in his carpet.

You can't squeeze blood from a rock.

Who does not beat his own child will later beat his own breast.

You can't put an old head on young shoulders.

You can't pick up two melons with one hand.

More Persian Proverbs
More Proverbs

Korean Proverbs

2008-02-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

Huang zhen yi, 황진이 or 黃眞伊 (Hwang Jin-i 1520c.-1560c), a talented beauty, skillful in her dance as well as the ability to write great poems and could play the geomungo (a traditional Korean instrument)well.

A kitchen knife cannot carve its own handle.

Even children of the same mother look different.

If you starve for three days, there is no thought that does not invade your imagination.

The bad ploughman quarrels with his ox.

The deeper the water are, the more still they run.

When there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important.

Man's affairs are evaluated only after his coffin is closed.

Man's extremity, God's opportunity.

Put off one day and ten days will pass.

A nobleman's calf does not know how a butcher kills.

Carve the peg by looking at the hole.

Words have no wings but they can fly a thousand miles.

You will hate a beautiful song if you sing it often.

If you like things easy, you'll have difficulties; if you like problems, you'll succeed.

Cast no dirt into the well that gives you water.

Cast not pearls to swine.

Catch not at the shadow, and lose the substance.

Cross even a stone bridge after you've tested it.

Even a fish would not get into trouble if it kept its mouth shut.

If

2008-02-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

By Rudyard Kipling

More Inspirational Poems

Indian Proverb

2008-02-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

Anger ends in cruelty. Coping with Anger and Causes of Chronic Anger -- Chronic Anger
Click here to learn how to Control Our Emotion

The way to overcome the angry man is with gentleness, the evil man with goodness, the miser with generosity and the liar with truth.

Large desire is endless poverty.

Keep fiveyards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a wicked man cannot be measured.

Garlic is as good as ten mothers.

Life is not a continuum of pleasant choices, but of inevitable problems that call for strength, determination, and hard work.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.

September blow soft till the fruit's in the loft.

Sit on the bank of a river and wait: Your enemy's corpse will soon float by.

Don't bargain for fish which are still in the water.

Fate and self-help share equally in shaping our destiny.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

To the mediocre, mediocrity appears great.

You can never enter the same river twice.

You can often find in rivers what you cannot find in oceans.

Once out of the throat it spreads over the world.

The adult looks to deeds, the child to love.

Agriculture is best, enterprise is acceptable, but avoid being on a fixed wage.

You can only lean against that which resists.

Blaming your faults on your nature does not change the nature of your faults.

Blow the wind ne'er so fast, it will lower at last.

Japanese And Zen Proverbs

2008-01-26T09:16:00.000-08:00

Khalil Gibran Painting

If you wish to learn the highest truths, begin with the alphabet.

No branch is better than its trunk.

Darkness reigns at the foot of the lighthouse.

A fog cannot be dispelled by a fan.

Adversity is the foundation of virtue.

Affinity is a mysterious thing, but it is spicy.

Don't stay long when the husband is not at home.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

Even a thief takes ten years to learn his trade.

An excess of courtesy is discourtesy.

Bad and good are interwined like rope.

If a man be great, even his dog will wear a proud look.

If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.

If one man praises you, a thousand will repeat the praise.

If the father is a frog, the son will be a frog.

It is a beggar's pride that he is not a thief.

Laughter cannot bring back what anger has driven away.

Laughter is the hiccup of a fool.

Money grows on the tree of persistence.

My son is my son till he gets him a wife, but my daughter's my daughter all the days of her life.

Never trust the advice of a man in difficulty.

One kindness is the price of another.

One who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger.

One written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold.

Only lawyers and painters can turn white to black.

Silence surpasses speech.

The inarticulate speak longest.

The mouth is the door of evil.

The nail that sticks its head up is the one that gets hit.

The tongue is but three inches long, yet it can kill a man six feet high.

The tongue is more to be feared than the sword.

Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.

Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods.

To teach is to learn.

Virtue is not knowing but doing.

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.

Walls have ears, bottles have mouths.

We learn little from victory, much from defeat.

While we consider when to begin, it becomes too late.

If you look up, there are no limits.

The beginning of sin is sweet; its end is bitter.

Zen Proverbs

Chinese Proverbs

2008-01-25T09:17:00.000-08:00

Khalil Gibran Painting

All the flowers of all of the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.

A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without imperfections.

If your strength is small, don't carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don't give advice.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month's study of books.

If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for 20 years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men.

A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make home.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Not the cry, but the flight of the wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow.

Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring.

If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people.

Patience is power; with time and patience the mulberry leaf become silk.

Dig a well before you are thirsty.

Be the first to the field and the last to the couch.

Never was good work done without much trouble.

The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

When you cannot avoid, welcome.

More Chinese Proverbs
Japanese Proverbs
Zen Proverbs

Quotes About Etiquette

2008-01-04T20:38:00.001-08:00

Claude Monet's Painting

Punctuality is one of the characteristics of politeness. ~ Martine's Handbook of Etiquette (1865)

A well-bred person always receives visitors... but if you are occupied and cannot afford to be interrupted you should instruct the servant beforehand to say you are 'not at home'. ~ The Habits of Good Society (1859)

A 'bore' is a person who does not know when you have had enough of his or her company. ~The Habits of Good Society (1859)

The introduction is of an inferior (which position a gentleman always holds to a lady) to the superior. ~The Habits of Good Society (1859)

Money is never talked of in polite society; it is taken for granted. ~ The book of Good Manners, Mrs Burton Kingsland (1901)

The etiquette of hand-shaking is simple. A man has no right to take a lady's hand till it is offered. ~ The Habits of Good Society (1859)

The gentleman who shakes hands with great warmth and empressement are two distinct individuals; the one is cordial and large-hearted -- the other wishes to ingratiate himself. ~ Manners and Rules of Good Society (1912)

A lady should conquer a habit of breathing hard, or coming in very hot, or even looking very blue and shivery. ~ The Habits of Good Society (1859)

A man, ... whether he aspires to be a gentleman or not, should learn to box. There are but few rules... , strike out, strike straight, strike sudden. Two gentlemen never fight; the art of boxing is brought into use in punishing a stronger and more impudent fellow of a class beneath your own. ~ The Habits of Good Society (1859)

All immoral or indecent acts of conduct, improper liberties or familiarities with the female passengers, blasphemous, obscene, or indecent language, ro language tending to a breach of the peace, swearing, gambling, drunkenness, fighting, disorderly, riotuous, quarrelsome, or insubordinate conduct and also all deposits of filth or offensive acts of uncleanliness in the between decks, are strictly prohibited. ~ From the Order in Council, for promoting order and health in passenger Ships to any of Her Majesty's possessions abroad (1864)

Women should dress quietly and inconspicuously when travelling. Anything startling should be avoided. ~ The Book of Etiquette Lady Troubridge (1926)

Divorced Ladies lose all titles. They assume their maiden name, and Mrs prefixed. ~ Beeton's Complete Letter-Writer for Gentlemen (1860)

It is very important that a mother should train her boys properly, from their earliest years. She must teach them that it is right for them to wait upon Ladies. There is no surer sign of a 'middle class' point of view than when men say that anything will do for women. In the upper classes, the men may be bad in many outward ways, but they pay every mark of respect to the women of their family. ~ Etiquette-Up-To-Date Lucie Heaton Armstrong (1924)

An Excerpt About Children

2007-12-29T20:04:00.000-08:00

When we talk with children about things that matter we are also dealing with our own childhood. We look back to injustices we experienced -- the times when we told the truth and it was not believed, the times we were blamed and were not responsible, the many occasions on which we were humiliated and resolved never to inflict this upon anyone else. We remember the positive experiences, too -- being free to explore in the countryside or play hopscotch and ball games in the street, for example, belonging to a close-knit extended family and celebrating family festivals with aunts, uncles and grandparents -- and we feel sad that we can offer these things to our children only as our own treasured memories. We sift through the values we learned, or those we felt were inflicted upon us, as children, reinterpreting them in terms of our adult priorities and changing world.

The speed of change -- new technology, new diseases, new threats and new opportunities -- must make us reflect carefully on everything we are trying to teach our children. For one thing is sure: they will not inhabit a society identical to that into which we were born, and by the time they are into their twenties or thirties, it may have changed beyond recognition. They will need the flexibility, courage and the strong personal values both to see and to adapt to new challenges, and to strive with others to find solutions to environmental and human problems that may appear overwhelming.

By Sheila Kitzinger and Celia Kitzinger

Quotes About Memory

2007-12-15T06:25:00.000-08:00

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.

We do not remember days; we remember moments. ~Cesare Pavese

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. ~Jean de Boufflers

Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. ~Seneca

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~ Oscar Wilde

Memory is the mother of all wisdom. ~ Aeschylus

Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Leonard Huxley

A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The true art of memory is the art of attention. ~ Dr Samuel Johnson

The heart that truly loves never forgets. ~ Proverb quotes

Memory is the library of the mind. ~ Francis Fauvel

Liars need good memories. ~ French Proverb quotes

Souvenirs are perishable; fortunately, memories are not. ~ Susan Spano

Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. ~ Kevin Arnold

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise. ~ Cardinal John Henry Newman

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~Diane Ackerman

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. ~ Anna Mary Robertson Moses

A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.

Paintings By Claude Monet
Who is Claude Monet?

Emotion Quotes

2007-11-28T04:33:00.000-08:00

The Crying Game(Boy George)

See that each hour's feelings, and thoughts and actions are pure and true; then your life will be also. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

As none can see the wind but in its effects on the trees, neither can we see the emotions but in their effects on the face and body. ~Nathaniel LeTonnerre

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. ~ William James

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. ~Mark Twain

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. ~Dale Carnegie

To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man's heart. ~Francesco Guicciardini

Your emotions affect every cell in your body. Mind and body, mental and physical, are intertwined. ~ Thomas Tutko

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy. ~Jim Rohn

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling. ~Claude Debussy

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue. ~Andre Gide

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it. ~Vincent Van Gogh

Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition. ~ Charlotte Bronte

But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions? ~Vincent Van Gogh

When the senses contact sense objects, a person experiences cold or heat, pleasure or pain. These experiences are fleeting they come and go. Bear them patiently. ~ Bhagavad Gita

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. ~ Robert Cialdini

Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness. ~John Sterling

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Feelings are much like waves, we can't stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf. ~Jonatan Mårtensson

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. ~Albert Einstein

Sadness flowers to the next renewing joy. ~Jareb Teague

Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell. ~ Charles Kingsley

Life Purpose Quotes

2007-09-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

歌衫淚影 ( 梅艷芳)

School tests what's in your head. Life tests what's in your heart.

When you measure a person, put your tape around the heart -- not the head. ~ Rebecca Kaufman

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generation. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do not know: that people are here for the sake of other people. ~ Albert Einstein

Our task must be to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. ~ Albert Einstein

If all human lives depended upon their usefulness, there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world. ~ Gene Tunney

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not becomes dirty. ~ Mohandas Gandhi

To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have delved so deeply into right and wrong, and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we did not notice the absolute immorality of our own oppression of animals. ~ Brigid Brophy

It is not enough merely to exist. You must do something more. You must give some time to your fellow man. Even if it's a little thing, do something for those who need help, something for which you get no pay but the priviledge of doing it. For you do not live in a world all your own. Your brothers and sisters are here too. ~ Albert Schweitzer

This is true joy in life -- being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as mighty; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ~ George Bernard Shaw

You will seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It is what you have not done that will torment you. ~ Wayne Dyer

The moment one commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his or her way. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness; thinking of others first. When you learn to live for others, they will live for you. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Life can be hard. Help another person take it easy. I am here for you. You are here for me. We are here for others.

More Quotes

Hans Küng Quotes

2007-09-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

I know from experience all the dark sides of religions -- the Christian religion and others. Even today, religions have often had a disastrous effect on many conflicts all over the world. But I also know the bright side of religions: as doctrines and ways of salvation and liberation, they can make sense; they can promote peace and reconciliation; and today they can still give men and women ethical standards and personal guidelines.

People of all religions know far too little about one another; above all, they know far too little about what all religious and ethical traditions have in common.

I am evangelical and am for a continual reform of the Church, which was affirmed by the Second Vatican Council.

I like the catholicity in time: our tradition is one of 2,000 years.

I like most that I belong to the whole universal comprehensive Catholic church and that it is not just a national church.

I remember the Curia said, that's up to the American bishops, not up to Rome.

I prefer everything that the Jews themselves call the Torah, the five books of Moses.

A human person is infinitely precious and must be unconditionally protected.

After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops.

As a matter of fact, you have deficiencies in all religions, but you have truth in all religions

At the same time we are aware that our various religions and ethical traditions often offer very different bases for what is helpful and what is unhelpful for men and women, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.

Because of the compromises made in the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Curia has done everything to get control of the Church again in a preconciliar way.

But from the point of view of the hierarchy, they do everything to hinder, for instance, Eucharistic Communion.

But I have to add - and this answers your other question - this catholicity in time and in space is only meaningful for me if there is, at the same time, a concentration on the Gospel.

First, the importance of the Bible being valued highly in the liturgy, in theology, and in the whole life of the Church.

However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.

Humanity today possesses sufficient economic, cultural and spiritual resources to introduce a better global order.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

If priests were allowed to marry, if this would be an optional thing, and if he could have wife and children, he would certainly have less temptation to satisfy certain sexual impulses with minors.

In the question of homosexuality, the Vatican was rather permissive or lenient, with regard to all these crimes of sexual abuse.

It is an absolutely unique success of the church community to have introduced such an epoch-making change, in just a few years, without having a serious division.

Popes going to Fatima and preaching there - the Gospel of Fatima is exaggerated.

Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war.

Second, we also got a more authentic liturgy of the people of God, in the vernacular language.

That is an offense for all the other religions, and it's arrogance on the side of the Catholic Church to think that we are not at all deficient.

That is the Roman way: to give favors to the favorites.

That means that every human being - without distinction of sex, age, race, skin color, language, religion, political view, or national or social origin - possesses an inalienable and untouchable dignity.

The Council's decree Nostra Aetate - On World Religions - is a very open decree which does not offend anybody but which estimates highly all the other religions.

The Gospel has to be the norm.

First, the importance of the Bible being valued highly in the liturgy, in theology, and in the whole life of the Church.

Quotations About Sorrows II

2007-08-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

似水流年 (sorrow quotes)

Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal. ~ Honore de Balzac

Sorrow, the heart must bear,
Sits in the home of each, conspicuous there.
Many a circumstance, at least,
Touches the very breast.
For those
Whom any sent away,--he knows:
And in the live man's stead,
Armor and ashes reach
The house of each.
~ Robert Browning

Nothing comes to us too soon but sorrow.
~ Philip James Bailey

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
~ Oscar Wilde

Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.
~ John Webster

Whatever, below God, is the object of our love, will, at some time or other, be the matter of our sorrow. ~ Richard Cecil

It is those who make the least display of their sorrow who mourn the deepest. ~ Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven. ~ Edwin Hubbell Chapin

It is with sorrows, as with countries, each man has his own. ~ Francois August Rene de Chateaubriand

Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths. ~ Philip James Bailey

Past sorrows, let us moderately lament them;
For those to come, seek wisely to prevent them. ~ John Webster

Thou canst not tell how rich a dowry sorrow gives the soul, how firm a faith and eagle sight of God. ~ Henry Alford

Sorrow is Mount Sinai. If one will, one may go up and talk with God, face to face.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

Sorrow makes men sincere. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the lands where sorrow is unknown. ~ William Cowper

Sorrow is a stone that crushes a single bearer to the ground, while two are able to carry it with ease. ~ Philip James Bailey

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear as the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts that work no harm do terrify us more than men in steel with woody purpose. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been and may be again. ~ William Wordsworth

Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

Sorrow preys upon
Its solitude, and nothing more diverts it
From its sad visions of the other world
Than calling it at moments back to this.
The busy have no time for tears.
~ Lord Byron

Quotations About Sorrows I

2007-08-16T01:43:00.000-07:00

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break. ~ William Shakespeare

Great sorrows have no leisure to complain:
Least ills vent forth, great griefs within remain. ~ William Goffe

Sorrow is not evil, since it stimulates and purifies. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

We pick our own sorrows out of the joys of other men, and from their sorrows likewise we derive our joys. ~ Owen Felltham

There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery. ~ Dante

Great sorrows cannot speak. ~ Dr. John Donne

The capacity of sorrow belongs to our grandeur, and the loftiest of our race are those who have had the profoundest sympathies, because they have had the profoundest sorrows. ~ Henry Giles

As the Christian's sorrows multiply, his patience grows, until, with sweet, unruffled quiet, he can confront the ills of life, and, though inwardly wincing, can calmly pursue his way to the restful grave, while his old, harsh voice is softly cadenced into sweetest melody, like the faint notes of an angel's whispered song. As patience deepens, charity and sympathy increase. ~ George Horace Lorimer

Ah, if you knew what peace there is in an accepted sorrow! ~ Madame Guyon

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
~ George Eliot

To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair. ~ George Eliot

Even by means of our sorrows we belong to the eternal plan. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt

The sorrow which calls for help and comfort is not the greatest, nor does it come from the depths of the heart. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt

Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails,--to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well. ~ Leigh Hunt

From the very summit of his sorrows, where he had gone to die, Moses, for the first time in his life, caught a view of the land of Canaan. He did not know, as he went over the rocks, torn and weary, how lovely the prospect was from the top. In this world, it frequently happens that when man has reached the place of anguish, God rolls away the mist from his eyes, and the very spot selected as the receptacle of his tears, becomes the place of his highest rapture. ~ Joel Tyler Headley

In the bitter waves of woe,
Beaten and tossed about
By the sullen winds which blow
From the desolate shores of doubt.
~ Washington Gladden

Poems About Sorrow

2007-08-15T02:06:00.000-07:00

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping, and watching for the morrow,--
He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Do not cheat thy Heart and tell her,
"Grief will pass away,
Hope for fairer times in future,
And forget to-day."
Tell her, if you will, that sorrow
Need not come in vain;
Tell her that the lesson taught her
Far outweighs the pain.
~ Adelaide Anne Procter

I walked a mile with Pleasure,
She chattered all the way;
But left me none the wiser,
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne'er a word said she;
But, oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me!
~ Robert Browning Hamilton

There's no way to make sorrow light
But in the noble bearing; be content;
Blows given from heaven are our due punishment;
All shipwrecks are not drownings; you see buildings
Made fairer from their ruins.
~ William Rowley

Sorrow treads heavily, and leaves behind
A deep impression, e'en when she departs:
While joy trips by with steps light as the wind,
And scarcely leaves a trace upon our hearts
Of her faint foot-falls: only this is sure,
In this world nought, save misery, can endure.
~ Emma Catherine Embury

When the cold breath of sorrow is sweeping
O'er the chords of the youthful heart,
And the earnest eye, dimm'd with strange weeping,
Sees the visions of fancy depart;
When the bloom of young feeling is dying,
And the heart throbs with passion's fierce strife,
When our sad days are wasted in sighing,
Who then can find sweetness in life?
~ Emma Catherine Embury

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions: first, her father slain;
Next, your son gone, and he most violent author
Of his own just remove; the people muddied,
Thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers
For good Polonius' death, and we have done but greenly
In hugger-mugger to inter him; poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts;
Last, and as much containing as all these,
Her brother is in secret come from France,
Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds,
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
With pestilent speeches of his father's death,
Wherein necessity, of matter beggared,
Will nothing stick our person to arraign
In ear and ear.
~ William Shakespeare

Inspirational Poems III

2007-08-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

Life Sculpture

By George Washington Doane (27 May 1799 - 27 April 1859)

Chisel in hand stood a sculptor boy
With his marble block before him,
And his eyes lit up with a smile of joy,
As an angel-dream passed o'er him.

He carved the dream on that shapeless stone,
With many a sharp incision;
With heaven's own flight the sculpture shone,
He'd caught that angel-vision.

Children of life are we, as we stand
With our lives uncarved before us,
Waiting the hour when, at God's command,
Our life-dream shall pass o'er us.

If we carve it then on the yielding stone,
With many a sharp incision,
Its heavenly beauty shall be our own,
Our lives, that angel-vision.

The Heart of The Tree

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants a friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high;
He plants a home to heaven anigh
For song and mother-croon of bird
In hushed and happy twilight heard
The treble of heaven's harmony
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants cool shade and tender rain,
And seed and bud of days to be,
And years that fade and flush again;
He plants the glory of the plain;
He plants the forest's heritage;
The harvest of a coming age;
The joy that unborn eyes shall see
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants, in sap and leaf and wood,
In love of home and loyalty
And far-cast thought of civic good
His blessings on the neighbourhood
Who in the hollow of His hand
Holds all the growth of all our land
A nation's growth from sea to sea
Stirs in his heart who plants a tree.

By Henry Cuyler Bunner (3 August 1855 - 11 May 1896)

Inspirational Poems II

2007-08-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Plant A Tree
By Lucy Larcom (5 March 1826 - 27 April 1893)

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
Rootlets up through fibres blindly grope;
Leaves unfold into horizons free.
So man's life must climb
From the clods of time
Unto heavens sublime.
Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree,
What the glory of thy boughs shall be?

He who plants a tree
Plants a joy;
Plants a comfort that will never cloy;
Every day a fresh reality,
Beautiful and strong,
To whose shelter throng
Creatures blithe with song.
If thou couldst but know, thou happy tree,
Of the bliss that shall inhabit thee!

He who plants a tree,
He plants peace.
Under its green curtains jargons cease.
Leaf and zephyr murmur soothingly;
Shadows soft with sleep
Down tired eyelids creep,
Balm of slumber deep.
Never hast thou dreamed, thou blessed tree,
Of the benediction thou shalt be.

He who plants a tree,
He plants youth;
Vigor won for centuries in sooth;
Life of time, that hints eternity!

A Psalm of Life
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27 February 1807 - 24 March 1882)

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers, |
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, however pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.

Inspirational Poems I

2007-07-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

Solitude
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox (5 November 1855 - 30 October 1919) "The Golden Girl"

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Be Strong
By Maltbie Davenport Babcock (3 August 1858 - 18May 1901)

Be strong!
We are not here to play, to dream, to drift;
We have hard work to do, and loads to lift;
Shun not the struggle -- face it; 'tis God's gift.

Be strong!
Say not,"The days are evil. Who's to blame?"
And fold the hands and acquiesce -- oh shame!
Stand up, speak out, and bravely, in God's name.

Be strong!
It matters not how deep intrenched the wrong,
How hard the battle goes, the day how long;
Faint not -- fight on! Tomorrow comes the song!

Quotations For The Soul II

2007-07-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy. ~ Tryon Edwards

One of the hardest lessons we learn in this life, and one that many people never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure in the common, the near at hand -- to see that heaven lies about us here in this world. ~ John Burroughs

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness. ~ Michelangelo

Faith strips the mask from the world and reveals God in everything. It makes nothing impossible and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger, and fear, so that the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy -- like a child, hand in hand with his mother. ~ Charles De Foucauld

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence. ~ Freya Stark

As we begin to sense the divine in the 'ordinary', our 'ordinary' lives will become quite extraordinary. ~ Richard Carlson

We are learning from the teaching and example of Jesus that life itself is a religion, that nothing is more sacred than a human being, that the end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment, or a government, is the development of the human soul. ~ Anna Howard Shaw

Love...puts you in a right relation with God and others, reciprocal rather than heirarchical... But the great commandment is extralegal. Love cannot be forced. It must be chosen. You love not out of dread but out of your own fullness. It's what you were made for. When you fail at it, you aren't sent to prison, or to the electric chair, or to hell. You are commanded again: Love. ~ Nancy Mairs

When half the world is still plagued by terror and distress, you stop guiltily sometimes in the midst of your house-laughter and wonder if you've a right to it. Ought any of us to laugh, until all of us can again, you ask yourself, sometimes. ~ Margaret Lee Runbeck

Quotations For The Soul I

2007-07-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

Power of Love

You Are My Hiding Place

You're My Hiding Place

浪子心聲 - 許冠傑

Quotation About Creativity

2007-07-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

Curiosity is the fuel of creativity.

Creativity is best defined by two small words,"What if?" Let this be the starting point.

Creativity is a journey -- whenever you go, go with all your heart.

The first step toward creativity is to acknowledge and accept that by applying ourselves, we can improve and even expand our ability to be creative.

Creativity is the capacity to confirm through action what can be imagined.

Creativity is the license to explore, to try things out, and to get things wrong. If you are going to do something wrong, you might as well enjoy it.

Creativity doesn't always recognize talent, yet talent instantly recognizes genius.

When you can see what everybody else has seen but be thinking what nobody else has thought, you will have discovered your creativity.

The world's wisdom and the experience of the ages has been preserved through man's creativity.

If you are going to make a living on the proceeds of your creativity it's better to grow a thick skin than to buy an expensive suit.

In creativity, there is as much, if not more, to be gained from the journey as there is from reaching the destination.

Whenever possible, encourage creativity in others, not with the aim of developing everyone as inventors and artists, but ensuring a continued balance in this world of critical thinkers.

Creativity can only survive desperation when it is prepared to leave behind everything it ever believed in .

If necessity is the mother of invention, its opposite is the father of creativity.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to select and hide your sources.

Artists are rarely satisfied people. They like it this way. Their creativity is fueled by unrest and dissatisfaction, which makes them stand out from everybody else, and which is why they appear to be more alive than all the rest.

Caution in creativity is often fatal.

Knowledge and integrity give creativity its strength and usefulness.

Integrity is vital, for creativity without integrity is often dreadful and potentially dangerous.

One may establish one's creativity by being prepared not only to experiment with ideas but also to take as many of them as possible through to their solutions before presenting them to others.

Creativity is fluid -- it runs from moment to moment, a river of possibilities running into a sea of potential.

The best place to begin the quest for creativity is the moment you wake on a new day. Tell yourself that anything is possible, then get up and see what is.

With tension and skepticism, creativity would be far less appealing -- and far more predictable.

Creativity generates mistakes. True art is knowing which one are worth correcting.

True creativity illuminates what, without it, would never have been.

Creativity not only invigorates, it rebalances and energizes mankind.

For creativity to flourish one should try to look at everything as though it were being seen for the first or the last time.

True creativity procures the greatest happiness, inspiration, or motivation for the greatest numbers.

Go into the garden of creativity with praise and encouragement and it will bloom all around you. But enter with criticism and discouragement and it will wither before your eyes.

Quotation About God II

2007-07-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

God is great, and therefore he will be sought: he is good, and therefore he will be found. ~ John Jay

God is in the sadness and the laughter, in the bitter and the sweet. There is a divine purpose behind everything -- and therefore a divine presence in everything. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Those without love have known nothing of God, for God is love. ~ 1 John 4:8

The whole meaning of our existence and the one consuming desire of the heart of God is that we should let ourselves be loved. ~ Ruth Burrows

All emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy. ~ Thomas Moore

To receive the love of God is to recognize it is all around us, above us, and beneath us; speaking to us through every person, every flower, every trial and situation. Stop knocking on the door: You are already inside! ~ Richard Rohr

I believe in God, who is for me spirit, love, the principle of all things. ... I believe that the reason for life is for each of us simply to grow in love. I believe that this growth in love will contribute more than any other force to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All desire the gifts of God, but they do not desire God. ~ Hannah More

Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

Be prepared at all times for the gifts of God and be ready always for new ones. For God is a thousand times more ready to give than we are. ~ Meister Eckhart

We could not seek God unless He were seeking us. ~ Thomas Merton

To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you. ~ Stella Terril Mann

Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually. ~ Eileen Caddy

The starting point in the religious experience is wonder. ~ Seymour Cohen

Until I am essentially united with God, I can never have full rest or real happiness. ~ Julian of Norwich

The highest point a man can attain is not knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

God is present in the confusion and dislocation of the world. One encounters God not by turning one's back on that world but by plunging into it with the faith that the divine-human encounter occurs in teh midst of the encounter of human with human, especially in the struggle to create signs of the coming of God's reign of peace and justice. ~ Harvey Cox

God is greater than my mind and my heart, and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Quotations About God I

2007-07-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

Far beyond your intellect, far beyond your understanding, lies inexhaustible knowledge and wealth, strength and power, peace and joy. Do not use your intellect to find the answers for God and his manifestations. Everything is God. ~ Swami Vishnu-Devananda

When one finds himself, one finds God. You find God and you find yourself. ~ The Artist Formerly known as Prince

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. ~ George Santayana

God, so approachable by him who knows how to love, is hidden from him who knows only how to understand. ~ Alexis Carrel

God will of necessity always be a hidden God. His loudest cry is silence. If he does not manifest himself to us, we will say that he hides himself. And if he manifests himself, we will accuse him of veiling himself. Ah! It is not easy for God to make himself known to us! ~ Louis Evely

Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy and with righteous indignation, God's compassion and God's anger working through us, maybe the surest proof of all God's reality. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I myself believe that the evidence of God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. ~ William James

You should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God." ~ Kahlil Gibran

God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress. ~ Psalms 46:1

God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. ~ Meister Eckhart

God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home. ~ Joseph Roux

He is the first and the last, the manifest and the hidden: and He Knoweth all things. ~ Al'Quran

God does not ask anything else of you except that you let yourself go and let God be God in you. ~ Meister Eckhart

God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed. ~ St. Augustine

God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped he would not be God. ~ Evagrius Ponticus

The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to his inpouring. ~ Meister Eckhart

Nothing is stranger, more disconcerting, more misleading than a manifestation of God. We always take God to be different from what he is. ~ Louis Evely

Funny Quotations About Fathers

2007-06-14T02:27:00.000-07:00

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years. ~ Ernest Hemingway

I never got along with my dad. Kids used to come up to me and say, "My dad can beat up your dad." and I say,"Yeah? When?" ~ Bill Hicks

My father only hit me once -- but he used a Volvo. ~ Bob Monkhouse

A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world. ~ Helen Rowland

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them. ~ Bertrand Russell

Growing up, my father told me I could be whomever I wanted. What a cruel hoax that was! I'm still his son. ~ Kenny Smith

Quotes About Promises II

2007-05-31T09:33:00.001-07:00

Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise.

When a man repeats a promise again and again, he means to fail you. ~Proverb

A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain. ~Arabian Proverb

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. ~Bill Cosby

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality. ~Harold Geneen

A promise is a debt. ~Proverb

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ~Jean Jacques Rousseau

God's promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine. ~David Nicholas

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans. ~Peter F. Drucker

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. ~Karl Popper

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. ~Samuel Johnson

A liar is always lavish of oaths. ~Pierre Corneille

In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter. ~Chinese Proverb

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. ~John Burroughs

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. ~Marcel Proust

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. ~Simone Weil

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. ~Carl Jung

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise. ~Niccolo Machiavelli

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform. ~William Penn

Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth. ~Mohandas Gandhi

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers. ~Nikita Khrushchev

Promise little and do much. ~Hebrew Proverb

One promises much, to avoid giving little. ~Marquis de Vauvenargues

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. ~Wayne Dyer

A politician is known by the promises he keeps.

Quotes About Promises I

2007-05-31T09:08:00.000-07:00

Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver.

Eggs and oaths are easily broken. ~Danish Proverb

Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing. ~Bernard M. Baruch

Promises make debt, and debt makes promises. ~Dutch Proverb

Nothing weights lighter than a promise. ~German Proverb

A promise made is a debt unpaid. ~Robert Service

A promise is a comfort for a fool. ~Proverb

He was ever precise in promise-keeping. ~William Shakespeare

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise. ~William Dean Howells

Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep. ~Denis Waitley

We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. ~Abraham Lincoln

For every promise, there is price to pay. ~Jim Rohn

The promises of yesterday are the taxes of today. ~William Lyon MacKenzie

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. ~Hannah Arendt

Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made. ~Edgar Watson Howe

We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears. ~Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld

When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then - he needn't hope to find himself again. ~Robert Bolt

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it. ~Norman Douglas

Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once. ~Norman Vincent Peale

He loses his thanks who promises and delays. ~Proverb

Promise is most given when the least is said. ~George Chapman

Oaths are but words, and words but wind. ~Samuel Butler

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. ~Mark Twain

Promises are like the full moon, if they are not kept at once they diminish day by day. ~German Proverb

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Advice Quotations

2007-05-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.

Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety. ~Bible

Consult. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on. ~Ambrose Bierce

Advice is like castor oil, easy to give, but dreadful to take. ~Josh Billings

Most people when they come to you for advice, come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected. ~Josh Billings

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is. ~ Phillips Brooks

I never had a man come to me for advice yet, but what I soon discovered that he thought more of his own opinion than he did of mine. ~Josh Billings

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self. ~ Francis Bacon

The worst men often give the best advice. ~ Philip James Bailey

Most of us ask for advice when we know the answer but we want a different one. ~ Ivern Ball

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. ~ Walter Benjamin

A fool think he needs no advice, but a wise man listens to others. ~ Bible

Sometimes I give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it. ~ Mary Wortley Montagu

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice. ~ Edgar Watson Howe

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. ~ Cicero

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. ~ Erica Jong

Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it. ~ Gordon R. Dickson

When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him. ~ Henry Wheeler Shaw

It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. ~William Shakespeare

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right. ~ Hannah Whitall Smith

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.
~ Lord Chesterfield

Advice is like snow; the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Never claim as a right what you can ask as a favor. ~ John Churton Collins

To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. ~ John Churton Collins

In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend. ~ Solon

We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.

Success Motivator III

2007-05-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

When two men in a business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the depth of his being. This is the thing that makes him what he is, the thing that organizes him and feeds him; the thing that keeps him going in the face of untoward circumstances; the thing that gives him resistance and drive. ~ Hugh Stevenson Tigner

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr

I was not a winner when I first came out on tour. I had to develop a trust in myself that I had the ability to win. ~ Thomas J. Watson

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like the sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation. ~ Sir Walter Scott

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they are expected to do -- they always reach. ~ Lee Iacocca

No great thing is created suddenly. ~ Epictetus

Be a good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. ~ Helen Keller

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month's study of books. ~ Chinese proverb

Far away there is the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they may lead. ~ Louisa May Alcott

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle. ~ Ken Hakuta

Act quickly and think slowly. ~ Greek proverb

Success is not so much achievement as achieving. Refuse to join the cautious crowd that plays not to lose; play to win. ~ David J. Mahoney

Before everything else, getting success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius. ~ An Wang

I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got. ~ Walter Cronkite

Every man is the architect of his own fortune. ~ Appius Claudius

If you dream it, you can do it. ~ Walt Disney

Nothing splendid had ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. ~ Bruce Barton

It is not enough to aim; you must hit. ~ Italian proverb

There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. ~ Robert Half

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so. ~ Charles de Gaulle

In the performance of a good action, a man not only benefits himself, but he confers a blessing upon others. ~ Sir Philip Sidney

Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. ~ Vince Lombardi

Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible. ~ Francois de la Rochefoucauld

It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. ~ Special Olympics motto

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle, and a victory.

Success Motivator II

2007-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

Reach where you cannot.

There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe. ~ H. G. Wells

Continuous efforts-- not strength or intelligence -- is the key to unlocking our potential. ~ Winston Churchill

Future Favors the bold. ~ Virgil

Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory. ~ George S. Patton

Do it big or stay in bed. ~ Larry Kelly

There is one thing stronger than all the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. ~ Victor Hugo

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal, and you have to be willing to work for it. ~ Jim Valvano

I am not the smartest or most talented person in the world, but I succeeded because I keep going, and going, and going. ~ Sylvester Stallone

To do an evil action is base; to do a good action, without incurring danger, is common enough. But it is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds though he risks everything. ~ Plutarch

No one succeeds without effort. Those who succeed owe their success to their perseverance. ~ Ramana Maharishi

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke of impossibility. ~ Charles F. Kettering

Great hopes make great men. ~ Thomas Fuller

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. ~ Charles Mingus

The difficulties and struggles of today are but the price we must pay for the accomplishments and victories of tomorrow. ~ William J.H. Boetcker

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them. ~ Washington Irving

The sure way to miss success is to miss the opportunity. ~ Victor Chasles

Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration. ~ Thomas Edison

An idea is salvation by imagination. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love. Give it the best there is in you. Seize your opportunities. And be a member of the team. ~ Benjamin F. Fairless

The secret of success is constancy of purpose. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions forms habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny. ~ Tyron Edwards

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. ~ Elmer Letterman

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking. ~ Voltaire

If you want to succeed, you must make your own opportunites as you go. ~ John B. Gough

Success comes before work only in the dictionary.

Success Motivator I

2007-05-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.

It is no use for one to stand in the shade and complain that the sun does not shine upon him. He must come out resolutely on the hot and dusty field where all are compelled to antagonize with stubborn difficulties, and pertinaciously strive until he conquers, if he would derserve to be crowned. ~ E.L Magoon

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters -- one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. ~ Saul David Alinsky

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. ~ Vince Lombardi

To fly, we have to have resistance. ~ Maya Lin

The price of greatness is responsibility. ~ Winston Churnchill

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it. ~ Horace

Progress always involve risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first. ~ Fredick Wilcox

The secret joy in work is contained in one word -- excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. ~ Pearl Buck

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win. ~ Bernadette Devlin

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. ~ Demosthenes

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. ~ James A. Froude

Nature gave men two ends -- one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most. ~ George R. Kirkpatrick

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. ~ T.S Eliot

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish. ~ Ovid

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's kind of fun to do the impossible. ~ Walt Disney

One of the rarest things a man ever does is to do the best he can. ~ Henry Wheeler Shaw

The wisest person is not the one who has the fewest failures, but the one who turns failures to best account. ~ Richard R. Grant

If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves. ~ Thomas Edison

Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them. Strong, able, alert men go after opportunity. ~ B. C. Forbes

The journey of a thousand leagues begins from beneath your feet. ~ Lao Tze

Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. ~ Swami Sivananda

If man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The glory of success is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Ancient Wisdom III

2007-04-09T07:57:00.001-07:00

If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

A day of sorrow is longer than a month of joy.

Time and age wait for no one.

He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.

Great thoughts come from the heart.

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

Blind men hear what deaf men see.

A great man can bend and stretch.

A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.

Small men think they are small; great men never know they are great.

If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave.
If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the really great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

Better late than never, but better never late.

Be kind to unkind people; they need it the most.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Only the man who crosses the river at night knows the value of the light of day.

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.

Only he that has travelled the road knows where the holes are deep.

The water that bears the ship is the same that engulfs it.

When drinking water, remember the source.

When the blind lead the blind, they will both fall into the water.

The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water moulds itself to the pitcher.

Once the water is out of the bucket it's hard to pour it back.

Blessings do not come in pairs; misfortunes seldom come singly.

It is not necessary to light a candle to the sun.

Those who play the game do not see it as clearly as those who watch.

There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.

Even the highest mountain begins from the ground.

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.

One hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes one woman to make a home.

Forget injuries but never forget kindness.

He who seeks revenge should remember to prepare two graves.

Thousands of bones will become ashes before a general achieves his fame.

The greatest victory is the battle not fought.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Better to do a good deed at home than go far away to burn incense.

Ancient Wisdom II

2007-04-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day, go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.

If you want to know your past -- look into your present conditions.
If you want to know your future -- look into your present actions.

A fall into a ditch makes you wiser.

You can't expect to find ivory in a dog's mouth.

Go home and make a net if you desire to catch fish.

Distance tests the strength of horses; only time reveals the hearts of men.

You think you lost your horse? Who knows, it may someday return with a stable of horses.

Once a word leaves your mouth, you cannot chase it back even with the swiftest horse.

A bird in hand is worth more than 100 in the forest.

To cultivate trees, you need 10 years. To cultivate man a 100 years.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time, is today.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

An inch of time is an inch of gold but you can't buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.

A smile will gain you ten more years of life.

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.

The tongue is like a sharp knife... It kills without drawing blood.

A word whispered can be heard for miles.

Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.

Failure is the foundation of success and the means by which success is achieved.

Great fortunes depend on luck; small fortunes depend on diligence.

Make no promises in a moment of joy; write no letters when seized by anger.

To be happy and contented, you must let go of what it means to be happy or content.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of regret.

Seeing it once is better than being told 100 times.

A man without a smiling face must not open shop.

To open a shop is easy, to keep it open is an art.

One person tells a falsehood. One hundred repeat it as true.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.

Black cat or white cat: if it can catch mice, it's a good cat.

Crows everywhere are equally black.

Listen carefullly. There are always ears on the other side of the wall.

If you know, to recognize that you know, if you don't know, to realize that you don't know -- that is knowledge.

You can't expect both ends of a sugar cane to be sweet.

Even the most clever housewife does not cook without rice.

Have a mouth as sharp as a dagger but a heart as soft as tofu.

At birth we bring nothing with us, at the end of the journey we take nothing away.

A man who waits for a roast duck to fly into his mouth must wait a very, very long time.

Ancient Wisdom I

2007-04-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

Who is not satisfied with himself will grow;
Who is not sure of his own correctness will learn many things.

Life is finite, while knowledge is infinite.

One's good deeds are only known at home; one's bad deeds far away.

Life is what we and our friendships make of it.

With true friends.. Even water drunk together is sweet enough.

When brothers and sisters argue, the bystander takes advantage.

Giving your son a skill is better than giving him one thousand pieces of gold.

Love your neighbours, but don't pull down the fence.

When you are poor, neighbours close by will not come; once you become rich, you'll be surprised by visits from relatives afar.

A friend is the one who arrives when the whole world has departed.

Hire a young carpenter but consult an old physician.

A room common to many will be swept by none.

Easier to rule a kingdom than to run a family.

Disease can be cured, fate is incurable.

When you go outside, watch the weather;
When you come inside, watch people's faces.

A dog won't forsake his master because of his poverty as a son never forsakes his mother for her homely appearance.

If a son is uneducated, his father is to blame.

Everyday cannot be a feast of lanterns.

If the family lives in harmony, family affairs will prosper.

To understand your parents' love, raise children yourself.

Good advice, like good medicine, is hard to swallow.

Dream different dreams while in the same bed.

Knowing is not as good as loving; loving is not as good as enjoying.

It is the beautiful bird which invariably gets caged.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees beauty.

Different flowers look good to different people.

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.

A vacant mind is open to all suggestions as a hollow building echoes all sounds.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

When we lose, we don't lose the lesson.

A book is like a garden carried in a pocket.

A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.

Learning a lesson never ends.

There are no mistakes, only lessons.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection without study is dangerous.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavourless.

Avoid the employment of servants too pleasing to the eye.

Get Inspirational

2007-04-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

No other success in life -- not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or writing a book, or anything else -- comes up to the success of the man or woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up and call them blessed. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

A hug is the perfect gift, one size fits all; And no one minds if you exchange it.

Cheerfulness is a yellow umbrella covering the rainy days of life. ~ Kimber Anne Engstrom

A man was walking in a wilderness. He became lost and was unable to find his way out. Another man met him. "Sir, I am lost, can you show me the way out of this wilderness?"

"No," said the stranger

"I cannot show you the way out of the wilderness, but maybe if I walk with you, we can find it together."

~ Emery Nester

Are you a leader? Look behind and see if anyone is following. He who thinks he is leading and no one is following is only taking a walk.

Quotation About Babies II

2007-03-24T02:13:00.001-07:00

Hush now baby and don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your Nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you. ~ Pink Floyd

Families with babies and families without are so sorry for each other. ~ Ed Howe

Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever. ~Robertson Davies

Any man that hates dogs and babies can't be all bad. ~ Leo Calvin Rosten

My friend has a baby. I'm writing down all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant. ~ Steven Wright, Canadian comedian

Power is the ability not to have to please. We haven't come a long way. We've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us "baby". ~ Elizabeth Janeway

"Who made you?" a boy of ten was asked. He stood in thoughtful silence for a moment and then, measuring the length of a baby with his hands, replied, "God made me this long, and I "growed the rest." The mistake that was his in leaving out God in his growth suggests the truth that we are partly self-made men. God and parenthood and birthplace partly make us, but we must make the rest by will and work. ~ Wilbur F. Crafts

I've been through it all, baby. I'm Mother Courage. ~ Elizabeth Taylor

Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money but long on hugs. ~ Robert Anson Heinlein, American science fiction writer

Rock-a-bye-baby on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough bend the cradle will fall, Down comes the baby, cradle and all. ~ Charles Dupee Blake

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one. ~ Leo J. Burke

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on. ~ Carl Sandburg

I found, one day in school, a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied,"The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. ~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell(1872 - 1970), British philosopher, mathematician & social reformer

The sweetest flowers in all the world- A baby's hands. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from? ~ Steven Wright

The only time a woman can really succeed in changing a man is when he is a baby. ~ Natalie Wood

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, "So. What did you think?" ~Steven Wright