I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White

O Beauty, Passing Beauty!
BY
Lord Alfred Tennyson

O beauty, passing beauty! Sweetest sweet!
How can thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes.
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee—scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word "kiss" hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lute string, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke.

Footprints In the Snow:

Footprints In the Snow:

We fall to the earth like leaves
Lives as brief as footprints in snow
No words express the grief we feel
I feel I cannot let her go.
For she is everywhere.
Walking on the windswept beach
Talking in the sunlit square.
Next to me in the car
I see her sitting there.
At night she dreams me
and in the morning the sun does not rise.
My life is as thin as the wind
And I am done with counting stars.
She is gone, she is gone.
I am her sad music, and I play on, and on, and on.
(Roger McGough)

Notker Labeo, a monk of St. Gall who died in 1022, indicate: "homo est animal rationale, mortale, risus capax" ("Man is a rational, moral animal, capable of laughter")

Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow