Live to Love

"There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day
A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me
'The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return'"

-Nature Boy by Nat King Cole (Greatest Hits, 1948)

Heart Beats

"And if I need rhythm, it'll be to my heart I listen."

- Roison Murphy in "Ramalama"

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love caries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-Donald Hall from The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin Company)

A Life Full

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt (April 23, 1910)

Image by: Randal E. Cubreth

Birmingham, AL

Proverbs 21:2 (KJV)

"Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts."

Whom Would You Be

“How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.”

-Coco Chanel

(borrowed from http://blog.mccutcheonweb.com/)

Bending the Truth

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

- HH Munro

Political Science

The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his listeners of his own assertions.

-Plato - Dialogues, Phaedo

Take a Left Please

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

-Robert Frost