You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. ~ Anon.

That's the Way It Is

“The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.”

~ Anatole France (1844-1924), born François-Anatole Thibault, he was a French poet, journalist, and novelist.

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Slow Lane

“Reading books is an antidote to urgency and chaos because it cannot be rushed. Every book has its own rhythm and a physical intimacy that E-mail and similar instant information can never achieve. Media glut often confuses information with understanding. Just when you seem to be most pressed, books miraculously expand time for reflection, cogitation, and mental rest.”

– Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

Tend Your Thought Garden

“What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Teacher's Goal

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
~Albert Schweitzer

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.”
~Carl Jung

Longing

"There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is."

Sylvia Plath

"The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."

Kierkegaard, 1845