September 26, 2012

• 55 Quotes I’ve Gathered Over the Years

   

   

   

  About 15 years ago I started keeping a commonplace book, copying favorite
  poems, quotes, sentences, phrases, and words into a journal, making a
  personal anthology of my reading life.

  Here are selections from a few of my journals, a slice of delight.

  More 55 lists here.

   

  1.  Love is friendship set to music.
  — Anon

   

  2.  Encourage one another.
  — Donna Boucher

   

  3.  Be always coming home.
  —  Ursula Le Guin

   

  4.  You can’t get a cup of tea big enough
  or a book long enough to suit me.
  — C. S. Lewis

   

  5.  Fair is where you take the hogs in August.
  — Anon

   

  6.  When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable.
  There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
  — Victor Hugo

  7.  If you can walk, you can dance.
  If you can talk, you can sing.
  — Zimbabwe proverb

   

  8.  The idle man does not know what it is
  to enjoy rest.
  — Albert Einstein

   

  9.  God will not guide us into an intolerable scramble
  of panting feverishness.
  — Thomas Kelly

   

  10.  The other reason that I make music is to celebrate
  the certainty of the Lord, since there is no other way
  I can understand the contradictions and confusions
  that surround me. 
  — Septimus Harding in The Warden, by Anthony Trollope

   

  11.  Not what we say about our blessings,
  but how we use them, is the true measure
  of our thanksgivings.
  — W. T. Purkiser

   

  12.  History is a vast early warning system.
  — Norman Cousins

   

  13.  Invest yourself in everything you do.
  There’s fun being serious.
  —  Wynton Marsalis

   

  14.  Calm sinning leads to catastrophic suffering.
  —  Terry Tollefson

   

  15.  If you try to make something idiot-proof,
  the world comes up with a better idiot.
  —  Jack Van Deventer

   

  16.  Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances
  we know to be desperate.
  —  G. K. Chesterton

   

  17.  We are what we repeatedly do.
  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
  —  Aristotle

   

  18.  I am practicing the art of grabbing minutes,
  perhaps the single most important art the
  homeschooling mom can develop.
  —  Cindy Rollins

   

  19.  The most wasted of all days
  is one without laughter.
  —  e.e. cumings

   

  20.  Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal
  hanging on of an uncompleted task.
  —  William James

   

  21.  Though no one can go back and make a brand new start,
  anyone can start from now on and make a brand new ending.
  —  Carl Bard

   

  22.  Never get into a rut. You cannot afford to do a thing poorly.
  You are more injured in shirking your work or half-doing a job
  than the person for whom you are working.
  —  Booker T. Washington

   

  23.  Your absence has gone through me
  like a thread through a needle.
  Everything I do is stitched with its color.
  —  W. S. Merwin

   

  24.  Never, never, never give up.
  —  Winston Churchill

   

  25.  Sit loosely in the saddle of life.
  —  Robert Louis Stevenson

   

  26.  There’s nothing remarkable about it.
  All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time
  and the instrument plays itself.
  —  J. S. Bach

   

  27.  Plan as if you will live a short time
  and live as if you will be here another twenty or thirty years.
  —  Ken Weddle

   

  28.  Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a
  friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
  —  Oscar Wilde

   

  

   

  29.  A good theology will invariably produce a good meal.
  —  Anon

   

  30.  Every load of laundry starts with a choice.
  You can make it a chore, approaching it with dread,
  performing it grudgingly. Or you can choose to
  take pleasure in the act of caring for yourself and your family.
  —  Monica Nassif

   

  31.  We labor under the tyranny of perfect heroes.
  —  Gary Barber

   

  32.  Eating has always been important to me,
  because the focal point of the day is the dinner table,
  a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
  The dinner hour is a sacramental time for me,
  a time for gratitude for whoever is gathered
  around the table, for the food, for our being
  part of the greater story of creation.
  —  Madeline L’Engle

   

  33.  For a second, the woman’s heart quailed before the
  fresh difficulties, but she forgot self at the look in her
  husband’s face. Her quiet reply, “We will wait, for God
  is in the waiting,” filled him with courage again.
  —  Eric P. Kelly

   

  34.  I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
  —  P. D. James

   

  35.  A perfect day should be recorded.
  It can’t be relived except in memory but it can
  be celebrated and remembered with gratitude.
  —  P. D. James

   

  36.  Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.
  —  Pearl Buck

   

  37.  Life itself is the proper binge.
  —  Julia Child

   

  38.  A phone call to say I’m thinking of you yields benefits
  all out of proportion to the time investment.
  —  Andree Seu

   

  39.  Maybe I’m a Luddite because I feel sorry for children
  who read “Goodnight Moon” on a phone.
  —  Dan Newman

   

  40.  Give me a man who sings at his work.
  —  Thomas Carlyle

   

  41.  A mother’s happiness is like a beacon,
  lighting up the future but reflected also on the past
  in the guise of fond memories.
  —  Honore De Balzac

   

  42.  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born
  is to remain always a child.
  —  Cicero

   

  43.  Children are durable
  and don’t necessarily wilt under adversity,
  just as our children don’t necessarily
  thrive under luxury and comfort.
  —  Garrison Keillor

   

  44.  Get off your attitude.
  —  Terry Tollefson

   

  45.  Only by God’s grace is a promise sure.
  — heard at a wedding

   

  46.  A small daily task, if it be really daily,
  will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
  — Anthony Trollope

   

  47.  Good prose is economical.
  —  PSAT prep book

   

  48.  Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with
  a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
  — Jeremy Taylor

   

  49.  A man who does a good job is OK by me.
  — Abraham Lincoln

   

  50.  He who would not be frustrate of his hope
  to write well ought himself to be a true poem.
  — John Milton

   

  51.  Really cool things happen on the brink of disaster.
  — Bob Jensen, local potter

   

  52.  Putting other people before our own tidy plans
  is a reality that needs to be observed by the next generation.
  — Edith Schaeffer

   

  53.  Good humor makes all things tolerable.
  — Henry Ward Beecher

   

  54.  Never think because you cannot write a letter easily,
  that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward
  not imaginable is better than none.
  — Emily Post

   

  55.  What people truly crave is appreciation.
  — William James

   

  • 3:25 pm
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