Ben Herbster

The greatest waste in the world is the difference between what we are and what we could become.

Henry Ford

Thinking is the hardest thing in the world... that's why so few engage it

Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you.

perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim

Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you.

perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim

Aristotle

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

~We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. -Aesop

~A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. -Fred Allen

~When you see a snake, never mind where he came from. -Anonymous

~Happiness is good health and a bad memory. -Ingrid Bergman

~Doubt whom you will, but never yourself. -Christine Bovee

~Realism...has no more to do with reality than anything else. -Hob Broun

~I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there. -Herb Caen

~It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking. -Julius Caesar

~What is a rebel? A man who says no. -Albert Camus

~A good teacher has been defined as one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. -Thomas J. Carruthers

~All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. -Walt Disney

~The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation. -Benjamin Disraeli

~Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein

~A problem is a chance for you to do your best. -Duke Ellington

~One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness - it is usually returned. -Court R. Flint

~Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none. -Benjamin Franklin

~If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone. -Benjamin Franklin

~Joy is not in things, it is in us. -Benjamin Franklin

~Never confuse motion with action. -Benjamin Franklin

~There was never a good war, or a bad peace. -Benjamin Franklin

~You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. -James A. Froude

~You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. -Indira Gandhi

~An eye for an eye would blind the world. -Ghandi

~Those who stand for nothing fall for anything. -Alex Hamilton

~You must lose a fly to catch a trout. -George Herbert

~Rome wasn't built in a day. -John Heywood

~The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket. -Kin Hubbard

~I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. -Thomas Jefferson

~I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. -Samuel Johnson

~Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. -Franklin P. Jones

~Mistakes are the portals of discovery. -James Joyce

~When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters--one represents danger and one represents opportunity.

~Some men see things as they are and ask "Why?" I dream of things that never were and ask "Why not?" -J. F. Kennedy

~Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. -John F. Kennedy

~Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -Martin Luther King

~What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive? -Irv Kupcinet

~If you want to catch a trout, don't go fishing in a herring barrel. -Ann Landers

~You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom. -Malcolm X

~You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. -Plato

~There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen. -Hugh Prather

~Laziness is nothing more than a habit of resting before you get tired. -Jules Renard

~It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself. -Eleanor Roosevelt

~Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt. -George Sewell

~The leopard does not change his spots. -William Shakespeare

~The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum. -George Bernard Shaw

~I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. -Solomon Short

~A friend is a gift you give yourself. -Robert Louis Stevenson

~Every exit is an entrance somewhere else. -Tom Stoppard

~There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness. -Han Suyin

~Kind words are short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. -Mother Theresa

~Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. -Henry David Thoreau

~Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. -Mark Twain

~You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. -Mark Twain

~There are two ways to spread the light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton

Clint Eastwood

“ever noticed, how you come across somebody once in a while, that you shouldn’t have fucked with?……..thats me”

Henry Wadsworth

~ Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. ~

Charles Baudelaire

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

I do not love you...

XVII (I do not love you...)
Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Bill Watterson

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

Antigone

Sooner or later, foul is fair, fair is foul to the man the gods will ruin”

charles baudelaire

"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."

Ayn Rand

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others”

Budda

“The tongue like a sharp knife... Kills without drawing blood.”

Wayne Dyer

"Be miserable. Or motivate
yourself. Whatever has to be
done, it's always your choice."

"The dilemma of modern man is simple: he does not know why man has any meaning....This is the damnation of our generation."

William Osler

Engrave this Quote Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Joan McIntosh

Accept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions - 'If I had my life to live over, I'd do it all the same.'

Jean Hans Arp

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Leslie Marmon Silco

You damn your own soul better than I ever could.

Bob Marley

“ You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

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.

Nietzsche

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
- Nietzsche

-Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice

In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.

Best ever

Ignorance, error, cupidity, and sin
Possess our souls and exercise our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse their lice.

Our sins are stubborn. Onwards when contrite
We overstuff confession with our pains,
And when we're back again in human mire
Vile tears, we think, will wash away our stains.

Thrice-potent Satan in our cursed bed
Lulls us to sleep, our spirit overkissed,
Until the precious metal of our will
Is vaporized -that cunning alchemist!

Who but the Devil pulls our waking-strings?
Abominations lure us to their side;
Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified.

Like an exhausted rake who mouths and chews
The martyrized breast of an old withered whore
We steal, in passing, whatever joys we can,
Squeezing the driest orange all the more.

Packed in our brains incestuous as worms
Our demons celebrate in drunken gangs,
And when we breathe, that hollow rasp is Death
Sliding invisibly down into our lungs.

If the dull canvas of our wretched life
is unembellished with such pretty ware
As knives or poison, pyromania, rape
It is because our soul's too weak to dare!

But in this den of jackals, monkeys, curs,
Scorpions, buzzards, snakes-this paradise
Of filthy beasts that screech, howl, grovel, grunt -
In this menagerie of mankind's vice

There's one supremely hideous and impure!
Soft-spoken, not the type to cause a scene,
He'd willingly make rubble of the earth
And swallow up creation in a yawn.

I mean Ennui! who in his hookah-dreams
Produces hangmen and real tears together.
How well you know this fastidious monster, reader,
-Hypocrite reader, you- my double! my brother!

Ann Landers (1918 - 2002)

Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high, look it quarely in the eye and say, 'I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.'

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.