Dreams Imagined

"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

A Perhaps Hand

"Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything."

- e.e. cummings

I Want to be Good

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good." - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

More Beautiful

"The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear." - John James Audubon

An Instrument of Grace

"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace." - May Sarton

Life is the Flower

"Life is the flower for which love is the honey." - Victor Hugo

Your Thirst Increases

"Kissing is like drinking salted water. You drink, and your thirst increases." - Chinese Proverb

What a Poor Life Without Art

"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
- Robert Motherwell

As Long as Something is Said

"It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said." -Jackson Pollock

Basic Human Emotions

"I'm not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." - Mark Rothko

Age

"Age is a matter of feeling, not of years." - Washington Irving

And That Has Made All The Difference

"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. "

= Robert Frost

I Am

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
- James Joyce

Lucky 13

"The number 13 has been unlucky for centuries. Some historians peg the superstition to the thirteen people who attended the Last Supper (neither Jesus nor Judas came out of that one OK), but ancient Babylon's Code of Hammurabi omits the number 13 in its list of laws, so the superstition dates back to at least 1700 BC. Thirteen is so unlucky, in fact, that in 1881 an organization called The Thirteen Club attempted to improve the number's bad reputation. At the first meeting, the members (all 13 of them) walked under ladders to enter a room covered with spilled salt. The club lasted for many years and grew to over 400 members, including five U.S. presidents: Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Despite the club's efforts, triskaidekaphobia (that's fear of the number 13) flourished; even today, most tall buildings don't have a 13th floor." - Claire Suddath from Time.com

What Man is That ?

"Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
What man is that?

Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March."

- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 15–19

The Ups and Downs

"Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul." - Thomas Moore

Plant a Flower

"All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind." - Abraham Lincoln

Why is That ?

"War is civilization at its worst and it's a strange twist that there's more heroism at war than at any other time. Men do things for each other at war that they'd never think of doing for each other in peace. Why is that?

We all must have the same attributes we've always had but I guess people don't have the opportunity to be heroic in peace as they do in war. It's an awful thought that there's anything at all good about war."
- Andy Rooney

I Do and I Understand

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)

A Desire to be Observed

"A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man." - John Adams, 2nd President, (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826)

Discovery

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life." - Charles Darwin

Wisdom is the Knowledge

"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two." - John Cheever

Signage

“Signage is certainly an important aspect. It’s really very important and we’ve been trying to bring in more signs. We’re trying also not to have sign pollution with too many signs", Swanson said. - California Concerned Citizen (sdnews.com, 1/21/09)

Know Them by Their Limps

"May those who love us, love us.

And for those who don't love us,

May God turn their hearts.

And if he can not turn their hearts,

May he turn their ankles,

So we may know them by their limping.

May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live."

- Irish verse

Human Events

"One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable." - Salman Rushdie

Generations

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." - George Orwell