Daily Inspiration 10/28/08

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. -Daniel Hudson Burnham

(In honor of the second anniversary of the death of my grandmother, my Nana, Ida.)

Daily Inspiration: 10/20/08

My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty. -Mahatma Gandhi

Daily Inspiration: 10/17/08

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

-Winston Churchill

Daily Inspiration: 10/16/08

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
-Mark Twain

(I don't know why, but whenever I feel the need for some wisdom, I turn to Mark Twain.)

Daily Inspiration: 10/15/08

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
- Hunter S. Thompson

Daily Inspiration: 10/3/08

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. -Confucious

On the occasion of the day after a big tumble for me.

Daily Inspiration: 10/2/08

When this debate is concluded, a motion will be made to lay upon the table the resolution offered in commendation of the administration... We object to bringing this question down to the level of persons. The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a contest over a principle. -William Jennings Bryan

Daily Inspiration: 10/1/08

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
-Chuck Palahniuk

Daily Inspiration: 9/29/08

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. -Susan B. Anthony

Daily Inspiration: 9/26/08

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it. -Joseph Joubert

Daily Inspiration: 9/25/08

Success is that old ABC -- ability, breaks, and courage.
- Charles Luckman

(In honor of McCain "suspending" or "taking a break from" his campaign...if only we could do that to face our issues.)

Daily Inspiration: 9/24/08

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning,...[then] they fall down the curtains. Charles Baudelaire

Daily Inspiration: 9/22/08

Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last.
-C.S. Lewis

(On the first day of autumn, 2008)

Daily Inspiration: 9/18/08

A woman who is convinced that she deserves to accept only the best challenges herself to give the best. Then she is living phenomenally. Maya Angelou

Daily Inspiration: 9/17/08

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
-Dr. Seuss

(Green Eggs and Ham was the first book I read on my own--it took me three hours and I locked myself in my bedroom until I completed the task.)

Daily Inspiration: 9/16/08

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
-John Berger

Daily Inspiration: 9/15/08

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory. Susan B. Anthony

(On the occasion of my birthday.)

Daily Inspiration: 9/12/08

The secret to humor is surprise. - Aristotle

Daily Inspiration: 9/11/08

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies:
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

-William Ernest Henley

Daily Inspiration: 9/10/08

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. - Kurt Vonnegut