History, Stories, Weather

Wise Words

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Today’s post is from tim
I sent a blog into Sherrilee and it got lost and rather than being able to find it due to my computer breaking and not having access to those files I thought about responding and in responding it Dondonde me that the punchline is that when I type stuff up it’s just kind of a quick off-the-cuff flowing commentary on what’s going on in my brain at the moment have you been able to tell…
The book that we’re reading in BBC nightingale starts out with a great first line not just memorable like they call me Ishmael but a great first line says something to the effect of marriage teaches you what you want to be an award teaches you what you are I hope to have memorable quotes that I can pass on as a legacy when I’m gone
something more than the fact that I miss spell the word form
every time every time every time
friend of mine just commented on the fact that her dad died and how difficult that was and it occurred to me that my dad left me with the number of sayings that I treasure and while I may not be the mark twain or Albert Einstein to be quoted by the world it would be nice to be remembered with a couple of meaningful sayings to pass on

are used to “Dr. Wayne Dyer from your Aronian zones and his quotation of the Declaration of Independence…”All experience has shown that mankind is more disposed to suffer-while evils are sufferable -than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

that’s a true statement but those Declaration of Independence guys got a little wordy didn’t they?
what’s your favorite meaningful saying

93 thoughts on “Wise Words”

  1. Good morning all. Today we have a puzzle to unravel – I left tim’s post exactly as he wrote it (with the exception of cleaning up the quote). I think I’ve gotten it all but one line – if you read it slowly and sound out the words, it’s like a treasure hunt. Enjoy!!

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      1. I told Clyde to try the voice recognition mode of the computer rather than hurting is hans typing

        I thought I’d try it myself and so as I was driving down the road yesterday giving dictation watching the words pop up on the screen I was impressed and hit the send button on the blog post

        rather than get back to it later and edited it turned out to be a busy day yesterday and it went unchecked and this is the result

        I will try to remember to check in the future

        you can tell if it’s voice dictation because the i is capitalized

        it also guesses at that some words that I forget to edit

        the new trail is a far cry from our well honed trail of old but such is life

        a nice place to hang my font

        the

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  4. A favorite from my father, “You don’t have to grow up, you just have to pay the bills on time.” (Advice after I got my first mortgage and wondered if this now meant I needed to become a “responsible adult.”)

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    1. Actually I neglected to name today’s post (just an oversight – nothing nefarious), so WP must have decided it needed something in that field! I don’t want to find out today what happens if you edit a post once it’s been published, but maybe later tonight I’ll see what happens!

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  6. I have been spouting all sorts of sage advice to daughter the past couple of days. She is having job interviews this week. She has a very promising one today for what she considers a dream job in Tacoma WA. She consulted with me most of the day yesterday, and I am exhausted with vicarious excitement. I think “Don’t worry your mother” is my favorite saying for today.

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  7. My mother, in a similar situation with me as I was telling her about going to grad school in Canada said “Why couldn’t you just have married the farmer down the road”. I admit to similar thoughts yesterday considering daughter’s plans.

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  8. My daughters have thanked me for these:

    It doesn’t matter as much what you know how to do, as what you know how to get done.

    Your life is made from the choices you make. You can have almost ANYthing you want in life; you just can’t have EVERYthing.

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  10. I like this attributed (possibly misattributed) to Goethe:
    “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
    I used to be better about launching into projects and figuring them out as I went along, but as I get older, I sometimes lack the inertia.
    I also like this from Emerson:
    “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

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  11. I worked Congressman Walz’s Townhall meeting in Rochester last night. (It was good. He’s a good speaker) He quoted Churchill several times. The one about the arts and ‘What are we fighting for?’. (debate if Churchill actually say that).
    And this one: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

    and he gave a snippet from the School House Rock, ‘I’m Just a Bill’.

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  13. From Ralph Waldo Emerson :
    “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

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  14. Another saying daughter isn’t heeding today is “Don’t interview for a job while your hair dye is processing”.

    She scheduled a hair appointment some time ago for today, and the job interview came up just yesterday for the same time, so she and her hair dresser have it worked out that the dye goes on just before the interview, and the hair dresser will take her into the shop basement for quiet and privacy while she interviews over the phone and her hair processes. I hope that the interview and the color job both go well. She could end up with purple hair if the interview goes longer than the dye should process.

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  15. I’ll be the contrarian today. I don’t have a favorite saying. More than that, I don’t think I should. Life is too rich and complex to be reduced to something so simple. For example, there is wisdom in resisting the tyranny of lockstep consistency. But by that standard the man currently pretending to be our president is the greatest leader of all time, for he is the least consistent “leader” we have ever seen.

    One reason I don’t have a favorite saying is that I think it is fundamentally wrong to tell other people what to do unless they ask. The only person I give unsolicited advice to is myself. And the best advice I can give myself is something like “do the best you can, given the circumstances.” On most days, that is a discouragingly low standard, yet the best one I can credibly endorse (and sometimes meet).

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      1. This is where you realize how important punctuation can be. Read BiR’s last line with no quotation marks and it has an entirely different meaning, a very creepy one.

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  17. To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same
    time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I
    can’t remember, all rolled into one big “thing.” This is truth, to me.

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    1. We live in an age which confuses facts with truth, uses statistics with little knowledge of how they are developed and how they apply, thinks the Golden Rule (see Chris below) is a do it for me not a do it for them concept, finds compromise sinful, and forgets that “The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.
      But I could be wrong.

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  18. Back in 1984, when I started weight training, I latched onto the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.” It’s still at the top of my list of things I tell myself when the going gets tough or I have to do something distasteful or otherwise inconvenient.

    Not saying I’ve prospered over the years from following that, nor have I “Just done it” every time I think I should have just done it, but at crunch time, it’s pretty good for all phases of life.

    My other favorite is the Golden Rule. To me, it’s a complete distillation of the key to a happy and productive life.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. “Just Do It” reminds me of the cult in which about 40 people–wasn’t it?–who committed suicide in the LA area. They were all wearing Nike shoes. Some wag suggested the Nike motto should be “Why don’t you think about it for awhile.”

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      1. I should have added that to me, “Just do it” implied I was reluctant to do things that were GOOD for me or to help someone else. Didn’t mean to imply that it justified giving in to temptations that were negative.

        Chris

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    3. i always smile when i remember the file i had on my desk years ago in all caps i wrote NOW

      I set it down on my desk and when I came back the upside down file had stuff for me to do after the weekend was over

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    2. Once again I have problems with sayings, even sayings as attractive as Linda’s suggestion. I’d love to “be myself.” But I daily face the problem of not knowing how. I’m nearly 75 and each day I learn more about the enigma that is myself. I guess I’m a slow learner.

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    1. I’ll confirm Linda’s observation here that I’m taking these things too seriously. The issue of being alone is complicated especially with Thoreau. His book–which I LOVE–makes a big case for being true to yourself and not yielding to the influences of others. He presents himself as a sort of heroic hermit living in a tiny home he built himself. In point of fact, he had a lot of help building that place. For one thing, he was camping out on land owned by his friend Emerson. He had a family that he ket close to. Thoreau routinely had visitors in his small home, although he chose to omit that fact. He was far from a hermit. I’m not accusing him of being a liar. He chose to present himself as a solitary figure for artistic reasons. He himself wasn’t alone nearly as radically as he asks us to believe.

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      1. Thoreau’s mother came round regularly when he was living at Walden Pond, bringing him baskets of food and doing his laundry for him. His self-sufficiency was largely a fiction.

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  22. “. . . and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.
    What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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    2. Yes, Jacque. When I hear really bizarre conspiracy stories I have to shake my head and think how impossible they are. People can’t keep secrets. Occasionally a conspiracy exists . . . but then somebody blabs.

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  26. stupid people never learn and make the same mistakes, intelligent people learn from their mistakes, and wise people learn from other people’s mistakes”.

    “All men dream, but not equally; those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.” – T.E. Lawrence

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  33. “They’re in front of us, they’re in back of us. They’re on our left and on our right. They can’t get away now.”

    Chesty Puller – Battle of the Chosin Reservior

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  43. “Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

    Vonnegut

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  48. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

    When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.”

    They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

    – John Lennon

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  50. Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

    – Leonardo da Vinci

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