Josh Billings

"If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her nose all the time."

Josh Billings

Josh Billings

Albert Camus

"Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth."

This computer has a mind of its own. OK I made a MISTAKE - but why does it have to make me look like an idiot ??

Helen Keller

"Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend."
(I misspelled the title of yesterdays blog - should have been "De Cervantes")

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

(corrected title to 6/27 posting)

Miguel De Cervantes Saaveedra

(corrected title to 6/27 posting)

Miguel De Servantes Saavedra

The peripatetic Cervantes failed at soldering, civil service, even tax collecting, but he could write In 1604, age 57, he published "Don Quixote" - the story of a country gentleman who believes he is a knight who, with his earthy squire Sancho Panza, sets off to pursue a noble but impossible quest. This tale has captured the popular imagination and influenced musicians, poets , and artists, and has been translated into more than 60 languages and 700 editions.

Perspective

A human life span is but a blink of an eye on the cool crust of a molten orb over the awesome expanse of time of a universe ever accelerating its expansion into space beyond comprehension.

A Senior Moment

Actor A. E. Mathew's memory deserted him at the most inopportune times. He once appeared in a play involving a telephone call that was critical to the plot. It was a call that he was supposed to answer, but when the phone rang on cue and he picked up the receiver, his mind went blank. Desperate, he turned to the other actor on stage and said, "It's for you."

Johannes Gutennberg (1394-1468)

He invented the printing press that helped spread truth, beauty, and even heresy throught the world. Without the mass production of books, Columbus might never have set sail. Shakespeare's genius could have died with him, Marti Luther's Ninety-five Theses would have hung on that door unheeded, the Inquisition would have fallen with no books to burn.

Beats "Hey You"

Because he couldn't remember anyone's name, Chuck Berry called everyone Jack. Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was once asked about her equally bad memory, replied, "Dahling, how do you think the 'dahling' thing got started?"

Friendship

"Today a man discovered gold and fame,
Another flew the stormy seas,
Another set an unarmed world aflame,
One found the germ of a disease.
But what high fates my path attend.
For I - today - I found a friend."
(Helen Barker Parker)

Senior Moment

English clergyman and writer William Lisle Bowles once gave a parishioner a Bible as a birthday present. When she asked him to write an inscription, he signed it "From the Author".

Helen Keller

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it's my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

Wendell Phillips

"Common sense does not ask an impossible chess board, but takes the one before it and plays the game."

Vignette

I learned to play chess by playing against my computer. It told me when I moved a piece against the rules. It is a relentless competitor. Its arrogant superiority was irritating. It kept before me tke time each of us spent planning our next move. I spent double or triple the time of my opponent. I concluded it kept these times in front of me soley for the purpose of intimidation. I guess it was effective - the end, my demise was anticlimatic.
(but I endured the abuse and never gave up the game)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."
(like as I am reading the biography of Condoleezza Rice!)

A Vignette

Win Schuler owns a restaurant in Marshall Michigan that has received national acclaim and awards for fine foods and friendly hospitality. He meets thousands of people. I stopped there once, many years after my first visit. He greeted me with "Welcome back Mr. Thompson" Unbelievable!
I later learned that was his trademark - greeting people by name. How does he do it? (I wish I knew)

Condoleezza Rice

"As an educated person, you have tools to change your own circumstances for the better whenever you find them stifling and along the way to change the lives of others too. But you have to believe - like many who had less reason to have faith in tomorrow but nevertheless did - that the locomotive of human progress is individual will. And then you have only to act on it, confident that you will succeed."

Helen Keller

"Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of fellow men. Then it appears that we are among the privileged."

Travel

Travel writer Stan Sesser follows the advice of Francis Bacon who, in 1601, wrote of a traveler "Let him sequester himself from the company of his countrymen and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth." Sesser recommends avoiding tourist traps and says you will be rewarded, as he has been, if you mingle with the locals, talk and eat with them where they eat.

A Friend

"The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship."
(William Blake)

Albert Einstein

"Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort."

Sparks

"Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks."
(Samuel Johnson)

Doubt

"Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity."
(R. I. Fitzhenry)

Helen Keller

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Perspective

A better title for yesterday's blog would have been "perspective." I think it's worthwhile occasionally to renew our understanding of the scale of things. We earthling view our earth as vast and massive and we see the sun as much smaller in the sky - when, of course, the exact opposite is true. But I have been describing only our solar system - which is a minor tiny part of our parent Milky Way Galaxy - - and there are millions of galaxies in the universe.

The Cosmos

oTo paraphrase William Blake, if we can see the earth as a grain of sand, then the sun is the size of an orange twenty feet away; Jupiter would be eighty-four feet in the other direction; Neptune and Pluto, larger and smaller grains, would be found at a distance of two and a quarter blocks away from the grain of sand called planet Earth.
(Source: "The Canon" by Natalie Angier)

Science

"The average American adult today knows less about biology than the average ten year old living in the Amazon, or the average American of two hundred years ago. Through the fruits of science, ironically enough, we've managed to insulate people from the need to know about science and nature."
(Professor Andrew Knoll - Harvard University)

Thomas Mann

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Jascha Heifetz

"To become an accomplished concert violinist, one must have the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk."

Thomas Hart Benton

"Before performing, one should drink gin and not bourbon, because bourbon sneaks up on you,while gin arrives with a punch, letting you know exactly where you stand, or fall."
(after imbibing martinis with Mike Wallace before his lecture on Martha's Vinyard 1974)