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Some Favorite Quotations BACK to JGR's Lycos home page. |
Janis G. Robinson DOWN to the bottom of the page |
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joke! Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools. "Quick's the word and sharp's the action" from Master and Commander movie "The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden." Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe "Every day comes bearing its own gifts. Untie the ribbons." Ruth Ann Schabacker "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." Franklin P. Adams "It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated." Edith Hamilton "A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead." Rainer Maria Rilke "How much of your life do you spend looking forward to being somewhere else?" Matthew Flickstein, Journey to the Center "There are many fine things which you mean to do some day, under what you think will be more favorable circumstances. But the only time that is yours is the present." Grenville Kleiser "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." Eric Hoffer "To accomplish our destiny it is not enough to merely guard prudently against road accidents. We must also cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us." Alexis Carrel "Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them." Benjamin Disraeli "Order is a lovely nymph, the child of Beauty and Wisdom; her attendants are Comfort, Neatness, and Activity; her abode is the valley of happiness: she is always to be found when sought for, and never appears so lovely as when contrasted with her opponent, Disorder." Samuel Johnson "The man who can think and does not know how to express what he thinks is at the level of him who cannot think." Pericles "Talking and eloquence are not the same; to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk but a wise man speaks." Ben Johnson "The best speech [anyone] can deliver is one that says all that should be, not all that could, be said." S. H. Simmons "I will persist until I succeed. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking." Og Mandino "I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work." Pearl S. Buck "Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength." Eric Hoffer "The skill to do comes from the doing." Cicero "In everyone's life, at some time, our iner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should be thankful for those people who rekindle our inner spirit." Albert Sweitzer "FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. It comes bundled with the software." Anonymous "A full cup must be carried steadily." English Proverb "Go to the people, live amoung them, learn from them, love them, plan with them, start with what they know, build on what they know." Kwame Nkrumah, the father of an independent Ghana. "They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." Sir Francis Bacon "Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop." Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD) "A reputation once broken may be repaired, but people will always keep an eye on the spot where the crack was." Quoted by Z/Journal "You are so young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as judge of the highest matters." Plato "Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said couldn't be done." Sam Ewing "One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going." J. B. Priestley "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." Robert Heinlein "Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood." William Penn "Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." D. H. Lawrence "Hanging onto bitterness and resentment is like eating poison and expecting somebody else to die." Unknown "We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Give us the tools and we will finish the job." Sir Winston S. Churchill, BBC radio broadcast, Feb 9, 1941 "The one lesson I have learned in life is that there is no substitute for paying attention." Diane Sawyer "Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper." Thomas Fuller "The song I came to sing remains unsung. I have spent my life stringing and unstringing my instrument." Rabindranath Tagore "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." John Andrew Holmes "A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work." Anatol Holt "The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up and doesn’t stop until you get into the office." Robert Frost "You will try. And try again. And again. And you will smile. Because it's so much healthier than crying or throwing up." Molly Ivins "Say not, "Why were the former days better than this?" For it is not from wisdom that you ask this." Ecclesiastes 7:10 "If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: 'He obviously does not know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned.' " Epictectus "How rare and wonderful is that flash of a moment when we realize we have discovered a friend." William Rotsler "Nothing has yet been said that has not been said before." Terence, Eunuchus, 161 BC "The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." Eden Phillpotts "Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient." Eugene S. Wilson "I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody." Lily Tomlin "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." Andrew S. Tanenbaum "Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it." TFTD-L@TAMU.EDU "I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem." Ashleigh Brilliant "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers." Charles W. Eliot, The Happy Life, 1896 "Somedays it's just not worth chewing through the restraints." Anonymous "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." Lily Tomlin "Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier." Kathleen Norris "Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment." Oprah Winfrey "Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are... Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in my pillow, or stretch myself taught, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return." Mary Jean Iron "I don't think so, therefore I'm probably not." Anon. "That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder." Sam Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes) "Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task." William James "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." Nietzsche Sprach Zarathustra "Creativity is a highfalutin' word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday." David Ogilvy "Sexual harrassment will not be reported but it will be graded." Sign in hardware store run by women in Stoney Lake, Michigan "There is a gap between expectation and reality. I have fallen into it many times, that's how I know." Sam Barber "A sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the unbearable." Moshe Waldoks "Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate-- A thousand years of Middle Life. Carolyn Wells (1869-1942) My Boon "Grain of sand in eye may hide mountain." Charlie Chan "Opinion like tea leaves in hot water. Need time for brewing." Charlie Chan "The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day ... a movement is only people moving." Gloria Steinem "Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Everybody is creative, and everybody is talented. I just don't think that everybody is disciplined. I think that's a rare commodity." Al Hirschfeld "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy." TFTD-L "I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!" Tom Lehrer "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 "The only thing worse than the babbling of fools is to hear your own voice among them." Michael Cochran "We were made for calm, not chaos, and that is why we long for simpler times. Somewhere deep inside we know that simpler times are better times." Thomas Kinkade "If you have made mistakes ... there is always another chance for you ... you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down." Mary Pickford "We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in pubic." Bryan White "If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." Inspector C.D. Sloan, His Burial Too, 1973, by Catherine Aird "Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." Abigail Adams, 1780 "The most important lesson you can learn from winning is that you can." Dave Weinbaum "I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. "The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." Socrates "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward." Sherlock Holmes (BLUE) "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not." Thomas Huxley "What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman." Lord Chesterfield to his son. Julia Child on nouvelle cuisine: "It's so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone's fingers have been all over it." "You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients." Julia Child "Half of knowledge is to know where to find it." Montaigne "The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them." Montaigne "What is required is sight and insight -- then you might add one more: excite." Robert Frost "Warning: Dates in calendar are closer than they appear." Bumper Sticker "Confidence is the feeling you sometimes have before you fully understand the situation." Anon. "Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will." Jawaharlal Nehru "Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night." Leo Aikman "The problem with people who have no vices is that, generally, you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues." Elizabeth Taylor "How great is the number of those in whose minds no source of thought has ever been opened, in whose life no consequence of thought is ever discovered; who have learned nothing upon which they can reflect; who have neither seen nor felt any thing which could leave its traces on the memory; who neither foresee nor desire any change in their condition, and have therefore neither fear, hope, nor design, and yet are supposed to be thinking beings!" Samuel Johnson: Idler #24 "I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest awhile." Max Eastman "Discipline is remembering what you want." David Campbell "Roosters crow, hens deliver." Anonymous "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." Tom Robbins "What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions." Walter Pater "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say." Quote from a Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees." Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division "It's not the change that kills us, it's the transition!" Anonymous "What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high." Unknown. "Obnoxious behavior in myself and others is always a sign of pain and a plea for help." John Powell "There are two kinds of light- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures." James Thurber "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement." Barry LePatner "There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." Ralph Waldo Emerson "The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up." Michel de Montaigne "I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself." D. H. Lawrence "Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." Marcus Aurelius "There is no wholly satisfactory substitute for brains, but silence does pretty well." Anon "You cannot make backward references in the restart step or steps following the restart step to steps that precede the restart step using the following keyword parameters: PGM and COND, on the EXEC statement, or SUBALLOC and VOLUME=REF, on the DD statement. (A backward reference of VOLUME=REF is allowed if the referenced statement includes VOLUME=SER=(ser#).)" from an old IBM JCL manual |
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." Anne Lamott, writer (1954- ) "The better organized you are in the simple things, the more spontaneous and free you can be in the more important things." Brian Tracy “Sometimes being quiet you make the most noise” "Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living." Toni Cade Bambara "One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork." Edward Abbey "This path doesn't always hug the ridge tops; it often falls into deep canyons, sometimes moves along the waterways, across the valleys, deserts, and the tall peaks of your inner self. Its direction may not always seem clear as you venture into the wilderness within." Charles Breaux "People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have." Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered." Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner" "He who would leap high must take a long run." Danish Proverb "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." Warren Buffett "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry with your girlfriends." Laurie Kuslansky "The sacred place is not remote; No special roads lead to it. If one proceeds where a guide has pointed, He will find only a slippery, moss-covered bridge." Genro "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." John A. Wheeler "There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way." Christopher Morley "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." Thornton Wilder "When someone says they don't have time for something, they have stated a priority, not a fact." Tom Barrett "If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." Arthur Kasspe "At the feast of ego, everyone leaves hungry." Bathroom grafitti at Bentley's House of Coffee and Tea, Tucson, Arizona "If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time." Dorothy Gilman, A New Kind of Country, 1978 "Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye." Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley "Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." Voltaire (1694-1778) "While poor design actively frustrates and angers us, quality is quiet, passive, and often transparent." Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web "That best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love." William Wordsworth "Give thanks for unseen blessings already on their way." Native American proverb "Raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind." Chinese Proverb "If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." Michelangelo Buonarroti "My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence." Edith Sitwell "Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken." Orson Rega Card "For him that stealeth a book from this library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck by palsy & all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, & let there be no surcease for his agony until he sink to dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment let the flames of hell consume him for ever & aye." Attributed to the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona; unable to identify published source. "Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it." Robert Heinlein. "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable." Helen Keller. "If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." Professor Irwin Corey "How many things are there which I do not want?" Socrates "Laughter is absolutely vital if you want to keep your work playful and your life simple." Thomas Kinkade "When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way." Tao Te Ching "Play the game to the best of your ability, without respect to how others play, except to support them in winning." Mike Orci "To make the journey and not fall deeply in love, well,... you haven't lived a life at all." Bill Parish, "Meet Joe Black" "The love of anything is the fruit of our knowledge of it, and grows as our knowledge deepens." Leonardo da Vinci "Ordinary people think merely how they will spend their time - a person of intellect tries to use it." Arthur Schopenhauer "The reason lightening doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time." Willie Tyler "I try to think but nothing happens." Curly "Teach us to delight in simple things." Rudyard Kipling "You can't promise your customers sunny weather, but you can promise to hold an umbrella over them when it rains." anonymous. "Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you." Frederick Buechner "Nothing can keep an argument going like two persons who aren't sure what they're arguing about." O. A. Battista "My cadets are far from this now, but the years will quiet them. They will be lost in making love ... for what seems like an eternity. They will ride waves, stage coups and fight them, and raise children. They will struggle for fortune like salmon struggling against a snow-swollen river. They will know failure and triumph intertwining, locked in a braid of life and death. But eventually they will sit in a quiet room and understand that the bright days and fiercely contested struggles have been solely for the purpose of bringing them to this poignant and tender silence." Mark Helprin, Memoir from Ant-Proof Case "One can never quite account for the process through which some particular area in the vast extent of history suddenly lights up in the mind and arouses a passionate desire to explore it further." Dame Frances Yates, Premio Internazionale Galileo Galilei "When you talk about your troubles, your ailments, your diseases, your hurts, you give longer life to what makes you unhappy. Talking about your grievances merely adds to those grievances. Give recognition only to what you desire. Think and talk only about the good things that add to your enjoyment of your work and life. If you don't talk about your grievances, you'll be delighted to find them disappearing quickly." Thomas Dreier "One must fight for a life of action, not reaction." Rita Mae Brown "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon." "I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." Helen Keller "It's amazing how long it takes to complete something you're not working on." R.D. Clyde "Who speaks ill of others to you will speak ill of you to others." German proverb "Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of pleasures, costs nothing, and conveys much." Erastus Wiman "How often we kneel to our weakness when we might rise to our strength." Joan Walsh Anglund "While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions." Stephen Covey "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." Ralph Waldo Emerson "I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one." Mark Twain "In times of change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." Anon. "The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going." David Jordan "There is a great deal of human nature in people." Mark Twain "You cannot do a kindness too soon for you never know how soon it will be too late." Ralph Waldo Emerson "No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood." Anon "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." Charles Kingsley "Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams." Mary Ellen Kelly "Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp; but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." Nathaniel Hawthorne "Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our civilization." Albert Einstein "No member of a rowing team is ever praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing." Ralph Waldo Emerson "We're all in favor of progress, providing we can have it without change." Morrie Brickman "I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself." Peter Hoeg in Smilla's Sense of Snow 1992 "Don't presume malice where stupidity is an adequate explanation." Flame war comment "Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw." "First, learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak." Epictetus "A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us." Maltbie Babcock "I've learned one thing--people who know the least anyways seem to know it the loudest." Andy Capp "He who is afraid to ask is ashamed of learning." Danish proverb "Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response." Mildred Barthel in Ensign "You never know when you're making a memory." Rickie Lee Jones "It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time." Barbara Kingsolver "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." Samuel Johnson "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem." G. K. Chesterton "There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say,"Well, here I am!" and those who come in and say, "Ah, there you are." Frederick L. Collins "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities 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." Ralph Waldo Emerson "The water that bears the ship is the same that engulfs it." "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." Winston Churchill "Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." Lorraine Hansberry "No mind is thoroughly well-organized that is deficient in a sense of humor." Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Habits are like a cable. If we weave a strand of it everyday, soon it cannot be broken." Horace Mann "You can't talk yourself out of problems you behave yourself into." Anon. "How would the person I would like to be do the thing I am about to do?" Jim Cathcart. "Intelligence is not to make no mistakes but to see quickly how to make them good." Bertolt Brecht "The nice thing about egoists is that they don't talk about other people." Lucille S. Harper "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place." Mark Twain "When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves." William Arthur Ward "You have to do it for no ulterior motive. You have to do it for the thing itself." Frank Shorter "I would rather have a mind open by wonder then one closed by belief." Gerry Spence "All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed." Sean O'Casey "Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you lease expect it, there will be a fish." Ovid "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." Nelson Mandela "The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you." B. B. King "Success is always temporary. When all is said and done, the only thing you'll have left is your character." Vince Gill "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. Winston Churchill "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it." Henry Ford. "There is little room left for wisdom when one is full of judgment." Malcolm Hein "Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt." (Confound those who have said our remarks before us.) Aelius Donatus "What was the crime, who did it, when was it done, and where? How done, and with what motive, who in the deed did share?" "To dream is happiness, to wait is life." Victor Hugo "No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats -- approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less." Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom "[Conan Doyle] is the creator of the most famous detective in literature. He bequeathed to the genre a respect for reason, a reliance on ratiocination rather than on physical force, an abhorrence of sentimentality and the power to create an atmosphere of mystery & Gothic horror which is yet firmly rooted in physical reality. Above all, of course and more than any other writer, he established the tradition of the great detective, the omniscient amateur whose personal, sometimes bizarre eccentricity is contrasted with the rationality of his methods and who provides for the reader the comforting reassurance that, despite our apparent powerlessness, we yet inhabit an intelligible universe." P.D. James Time to Be in Earnest, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) p. 18 "Self-control refers to the ability to keep emotions, physical desires and intellectual thoughts directed toward a given end. Often self-control is misinterpreted to mean a clamping down or elimination of feelings and desires. This is not so. Think of it, instead, as a pilot setting his course. All of the systems are used together to reach a destination. So self-control means using the power of the emotions, physical desires and intellect to move toward your life goal or destination. Emotions and desires need be checked only if they are in conflict with the goal." Thomas D. Willhite, The Book of Leadership |