Dream different dreams while on the same bed. The journey is the reward. Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
Beauty is the wisdom of women. Wisdom is the beauty of men.

Change

“Change is the essence of life.Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." Helen Keller

"Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves." Helen Keller

"Fear God, and your enemies will fear you." Benjamin Franklin

"Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to get leisure." Benjamin Franklin

"Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards." Benjamin Franklin

"We have the best Congress that money can buy." Will Rogers

"Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." Dr. Samuel Johnson

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." Albert Einstein

"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue." Albert Einstein

"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues." Bertrand Russell

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people." G.K. Chesterton

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." H. L. Mencken

"It is hard to tell if a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place." H. L. Mencken

"Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation." Henry Ward Beecher

"To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while." Josh Billings

"There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together." Josh Billings

"Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment." Jim Rohn

"We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment." Jim Rohn

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Woody Allen

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." Winston Churchill

"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Winston Churchill

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Abraham Lincoln

"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intellingent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." Elbert Hubbard

"Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men." Dr. Samuel Johnson

"Would you live with ease, do what you ought, and not what you please." Benjamin Franklin

"If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen." I John 4:20

"The million little things that drop into your hands, the small opportunities each day brings, He leaves us free to use or abuse, and goes unchanging along His silent way." Helen Keller

"Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul." Henry Ward Beecher

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." Alexander Graham Bell

"I'd rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are." Milton Berle

"A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control." Proverbs 29:11

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain

"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?" G K Chesterton

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self." Aristotle

"If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase." Epictetus

"If you would be loved, love and be lovable." Benjamin Franklin

"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence." Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." Thomas Wolfe

"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better." George Santayana

"A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book." Irish Proverb

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." Winston Churchill

"Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never." Albert Camus

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." Woody Allen

"An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather." Washington Irving

"My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe." Jimmy Durante

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore:
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate

Translation: Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe; through me is the way among the lost people. Justice moved my lofty maker: the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom and the primal Love made me. Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter!

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .").

“The thirst of desire is never filled, nor fully satisfied”

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.
Lao-Tzu

“Life is not a continuum of pleasant choices, but of inevitable problems that call for strength, determination, and hard work”

“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. - Wallace Stegner

“A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.”

“Love, you know, is a funny thing; But the funniest thing about it - Is you never can tell if it is love - Until you start to doubt it”

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

"There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together."

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."

another contribution by Brooke

Flowers
by H. Barnes
It may not be the same,
But some things never change.
I feel it and I trust it,
I still believe in forever
Because that's what my heart knows.

Memories are the dew drops on our petals
That re-open the buds that have closed.
Flowers wilt as seasons change,
Though they grow a little more with rain.

The sun will shine when in need,
And left behind, a precious seed.

I think I have grown into the person I was always going to be. To say that you did not have a big part in that would be a lie. I think that you taught me a lot about loving someone without conditions...quite a concept. In that I learned to love myself. You helped me see that I was worth loving. I spent a lot of time trying to figure you out....then I just realized that I know you and I trust that...you are absolute.

Inspirations are like an image ,but dreams are like an obligation in the mind which overwhelms the mind.

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it

Random Quote I found online .... quite nice

“You've changed so much. I guess that's what happens. I wish you knew how much you changed me. I wonder if I changed you, if your life isdifferent because of me. Because mine's different. My God, you taught me so much, and now we don't even talk to each other. I guess that's what happens.”

“Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.”

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die; Life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes

Thanks my dear Brooke for the submission!

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

Crowds

Crowds

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

Charles Baudelaire

I'm not cynical. Just experienced.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects

Part 3

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." --George W. Bush, Fort Benning, Ga., Jan. 11, 2007