Even on the road to hell a flower will make you smile

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.

"Evil will always prevail, because good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

I have added this to my top 10 favorite quotes of all time

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

Custom Poem

Emily Dickinson:

All but Death, can be Adjusted—
Dynasties repaired—
Systems—settled in their Sockets—
Citadels—dissolved—

Wastes of Lives—resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs—
Death—unto itself—Exception—
Is exempt from Change—

I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
William Blake

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
William Blake

Every harlot was a virgin once.

Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.

“A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools.”

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
Plato

Courage is knowing what not to fear.
Plato

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles Baudelaire

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities." Sigmund Freud

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

Virginia Woolf

"When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew."
William Shakespeare

"You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."Indira Gandhi

The power of one, if fearless and focused, is formidable, but the power of many working together is better.
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

“Believe me, if I started murdering people… there'd be none of you left!”

“You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago....”

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