• A watched child never learns.
• The eye sheds a tear to find its focus.
• If eyes could paint or brush could see.
• If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.
• Do what you must, and your friends will adjust.
• If an artist has talent, he needs no other critic.
• Never point a finger where you never lent a hand.
• Sometimes in tragedy we find out life’s purpose.
• I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.
• Life is too short to hold a grudge, also too long.
• God answers first the prayers we should have prayed.
• So often our greatest triumph is a willing surrender.
• Where the loser saw barriers, the winner saw hurdles.
• Never use the passing years as an excuse for old age.
• Few are humble, for it takes a self-esteem few possess.
• It is hard to resist a flatterer who gets it right.
• Life is short, God’s way of encouraging a bit of focus.
• Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward
• I have found that if you love life, life will Love you back
• If you can’t explain something in a few words, try fewer.
• Nothing reduces the odds against you like ignoring them.
• The way he treats his body, you’d think he was renting.
• To truly forgive is to allow the other person to forget.
• Am I lying to you if I tell you the same lie I tell myself?
• In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude.
• Know thyself, or at least keep renewing the acquaintance.
• The great enemy of achievement is a schedule already full.
• after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it’s a cha-cha.
• What is reality but the dreamworld of a limited imagination.
• A parent’s love is whole no matter how many times divided.
• Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.
• In a soulmate we find not company but a completed solitude.
• It is the first purpose of hope to make hopelessness bearable.
• If animals could talk, the world would lose its best listeners.
• A child seldom needs a good talking to as a good listening to.
• A lovers’ quarrel is always about every quarrel you ever had.
• Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on.
• You can accept reality without believing every yarn it spins.
• If I were Opportunity, I wouldn’t just knock, you’d have to sign.
• Sign over the gates of hell: “Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
• Where hope would otherwise become hopelessness, it becomes faith.
• A Parents love is whole, no matter how many times it’s divided.
• In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.
• Life is like sailing. You can use any wind to go in any direction. 
• The best things in life are not only free, but the line is shorter.
• The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions
• If you feel you are down on your luck, check the level of your effort.
• Inner beauty, too, needs occasionally to be told it is beautiful.
• Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.
• The road to success is not a path you find but a trail you blaze.
• Conscience is less an inner voice than the memory of a mother’s glance.
• If you keep rephrasing the question, it gradually becomes the answer.
• In the time it takes you to understand a 14-year-old, he turns 15.
• Metaphor for the night sky: A trillion asterisks and no explanations.
• One learns to ignore criticism by first learning to ignore applause.
• The world is as many times new as there are children in our lives.
• Do not call any work menial until you have watched a proud person do it.
• Every day is conquerable by its hours, and every hour by its minutes.
• The best things in life are not only free, they require less assembly.
• The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have.
• Among life’s regrets is all the time wasted being early for everything.
• In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too.
• Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a raise.
• Whatever you set aside to seek happiness, remember where you put it.   
• I hope some day to meet God, because I want to thank Him for the flowers.
• The secret to happiness is to put the burden of proof on unhappiness.
• Though you lose all hope, there is still hope, and it loves to surprise.
• The willingness to share does not make one charitable; it makes one free.
• You can as easily love without trusting as you can hug without embracing.
• Alas, by the time Fate caught up with my life, Chance had it all planned.
• The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have.
• A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership.
• A true friend sees past your excuses to the real reason it’s not your fault.
• As a friend, you first give your understanding, then you try to understand.
• Each day learn something new, and just as important, relearn something old.
• Of what use to get what you want if you must become someone else to get it.
• Worse than telling a lie is spending your whole life living true to that lie.
• You never get people’s fuller attention than when you’re listening to them.
• Never believe anything that requires you to hate people who do not believe it.
• Our destiny hides among our free choices, disguised as the free-est of all.
• There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.
• It is possible at any age to discover a lifelong desire you never knew you had.
• Retirement is having nothing to do and someone always keeping you from it.
• The trouble with always leaving yourself a way out is that you always take it.
• We picture love as heart-shaped because we do not know the shape of the soul.
• Brother and sister, together as friends, ready to face whatever life sends.
• God sends the dawn that we might see the might-have-beens that still might be.
• If you aren’t sure who you are, you might as well work on who you want to be.
• No relationship is perfect, which is why it is so important that it be loving.
• Say what you want about aging, it’s still the only way to have old friends.
• The people in your life who don’t need an invitation still like to get one.
• There is in all animals a sense of duty that man condescends to call instinct.
• We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.
• As any artist can tell you, it is easier to reach perfection than to stop there.
• At my age, you not only have bittersweet memories, you make bittersweet plans.
• I regret less the road not taken than my all-fired hurry along the road I took.
• I suspect that those who most enjoy heaven will be those who most enjoyed life.
• Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.
• The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.
• There is no expert on what happiness is but many on what it might have been.
• Through the blackest night, morning gently tiptoes, feeling its way to dawn.
• Two things are owed to truthfulness lasting marriages and short friendships.
• Better you don’t search for who you are until you know who it is you want to find.
• Even at times when I don’t care, I know exactly what I would care about if I did.
• I’m discovering that everybody is a closet quotesmith. Just give them a chance.
• If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.
• Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.   
• The shortest distance between two points assumes you know where you’re going.
• There is a limit to how much you can change to be liked for who you really are.
• Charisma is a fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention.
• It’s not that perfection cannot be achieved. It’s that it’s so hard to stop there.
• Most of us don’t need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with.
• Never believe anything that requires you to hate people who do not believe it.
• Perfection in art, as often in life, is better captured by eraser than pencil.
• That portion of reality that can be composed within a frame can be understood.
• The trouble with learning to parent on the job is that your child is the teacher.
• Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert.
• Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.
• A family is a group of people who keep confusing you with someone you were as a kid.
• I guess I have never really doubted that we are all born to our guardian angel.
• One is more apt to become wise by doing fool things than by reading wise sayings.
• Sometimes fate brings two people together by causing one to misinterpret a smile.
• Charisma is not just saying hello. It’s dropping what you’re doing to say hello.
• Family life is a bit like a runny peach pie – not perfect but who’s complaining?
• Never act until you have clearly answered the question: What happens if I do nothing?
• Nostalgia is a process by which dreams become memories without ever coming true.
• Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert.
• The more side roads you stop to explore, the less likely that life will pass you by.
• The toughest test of good judgment is to know when to withhold your better judgment.
• The trick to succeeding is to stop thinking that there’s a trick to everything.
• An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.
• Mom – the person most likely to write an autobiography and never mention herself.
• Once you find someone to share your ups and downs, downs are almost as good as ups.
• Sometimes in life we blow things out of proportion because proportion is so dull.
• Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea.
• There is always sufficient reason for despair, but there is never sufficient purpose.
• Wisdom is not what you know but how quickly you adjust when the opposite proves true.
• You can spend too much time wondering which of identical twins is the more alike.
• Artistry is an innate distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the five senses.
• Better you don’t search for who you are until you know who it is you want to find.
• I believe that there is an explanation for everything, so, yes, I believe in miracles.
• If you could travel back in time to the present moment, what would you do differently?
• In the end you don’t so much find yourself as you find someone who knows who you are.
• It’s not that perfection cannot be achieved. It’s that it’s so hard to stop there.
• Life is a vale of tears in which there are moments when you just can’t stop giggling.
• One can only imagine how effective justice might be if admissible in a court of law.
• One key to success is to have lunch at the time of day most people have breakfast.
• You can accept reality, or you can persist in your purpose until reality accepts you.
• Be thoughtful of others and you will not be shy, for they are incompatible addictions.
• Charisma is the fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention.
• Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.
• I look at it this way. I’m not an eavesdropper; I have an attention surplus disorder. 
• If I had it to do again, I would less often judge myself and more often ask for a jury.
• Question reality, especially if it contradicts the evidence of your hopes and dreams.
• Sometimes the answer to our prayers is to become the answer to someone else’s prayers.
• What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals.
• Hope is a walk through a flowering meadow. One does not require that it lead anywhere. 
• It is one thing to show your child the way, and a harder thing to then stand out of it.
• It is when there is nothing you can say or do to help that a friend needs you the most.
• It’s a nasty divorce when they can’t agree on how to divvy up the His and Hers towels.
• Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm.
• The advantage of growing up with siblings is that you become very good at fractions.
• The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.
• Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden?
• It can be said of optimism that while sometimes mistaken, it is never sadly mistaken.
• Often, what seems an impossible climb is just a staircase without the steps drawn in.
• Often, what seems like an impossible climb is just a staircase without the steps drawn in.
• Parenting is a stage of life’s journey where the milestones come about every fifty feet.
• What we find in a soul mate is not something wild to tame, but something wild to run with.
• You can be sad recalling sad times, but if you really want to be sad, recall happy times.
• In the realist you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination.
• It is a perversely human perception that animals in their native habitat are running wild.
• To truly know someone is to know the silence that stands for the thing they never speak of.
• Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things.
• Every lie is two lies — the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it.
• If God had intended me to make excuses for who I am, He would have given me better excuses.
• In nature we see where God has been. In our fellow man, we see where He is still at work. 
• Our most difficult task as a friend is to offer understanding when we don’t understand.
• Present yourself always As who you would be, And that is the person The world will see.
• See yourself always as cause, and perhaps a better world will be found among your effects.
• The hardest thing about reality is returning to it after an hour inside your child’s mind.
• You can hope for a miracle in your life, or you can realize that your life is the miracle.
• You will find that if you really try to be a father, your child will meet you halfway.
• A good speech has a beginning, a middle and an end, the best example being, “I love you.
• If you don’t decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing.
• Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire.
• Nobody’s perfect, and our fondest memories of anyone are of the amusing ways they proved it.
• When you have brought up kids, there are memories you store directly in your tear ducts.
• Always telling the truth is no doubt better than always lying, although equally pathological.
• I look into the faces of people struggling with their own lives, and I do not see strangers.
• Massage is the only form of physical pleasure to which nature forgot to attach consequences.
• Basically we are all looking for someone who knows who we are and will break it to us gently.
• Better to start up a thousand wrong roads than to keep going nowhere because you know the way.
• Eventually you realize that you can become the person you want to be by accepting who you are.
• Happiness is having a dream you cannot let go of and a partner who would never ask you to.
• If you knew that hope and despair were paths to the same destination, which would you choose?
• If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.
• Life is not fair, nor has it ever been, but the morning seems determined to dawn until it is.
• As a job seeker, remember this: You only lack experience if they want it done the same old way.
• I enjoy many silent moments with my cat, a conversation always resumed exactly where left off.
• It is not only possible to be the person you pretend to be, but there is less effort involved.
• Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress.
• Nature decrees that we do not exceed the speed of light. All other impossibilities are optional.
• The aphorist sees in every truth a wise saying, and in every contradiction, two wise sayings.
• The last I heard from my destiny, it wanted me to make a legal U-Turn at my next opportunity.
• Dancing is moving to the music without stepping on anyone’s toes, pretty much the same as life.
• I count myself lucky, having long ago won a lottery paid to me in seven sunrises a week for life.
• Parenthood is the passing of a baton, followed by a lifelong disagreement as to who dropped it. ,
• There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction.
• Blogs seem to have two magnetic poles, one attracting friends, the other repulsing relatives.
• Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie.
• If God had intended us to be alone, there would be more pleasure in massaging our own shoulders.
• If you have a mom, there is nowhere you are likely to go where a prayer has not already been.
• Recalling days of sadness, memories haunt me. Recalling days of happiness, I haunt my memories. 
• I believe in animal rights, and high among them is the right to the gentle stroke of a human hand.
• I like friends who, when you tell them you need a moment alone, know enough not to stray too far.
• Most marriages can survive “better or worse.” The tester is all the years of “exactly the same.”
• The key to enjoying the moment is to always carry a list of “Things I Gotta Do That Can Wait.”
• The world knows how to straighten out a spoiled child but never makes it up to a child deprived.
• What is certainty but the refuge of those whose faith is not strong enough to entertain doubt.
• All any child needs is the protection of loving parents and an alternative source of information.
• As a general guideline, never marry anyone that you can’t picture helping you go to the bathroom.
• Dancing is moving to the music without stepping on anyone’s toes, pretty much the same as life.
• Eventually, if you’re lucky in life, you find someone with the same chemical imbalance you have. 
• I wish to die knowing that I took a fleeting instant of eternity and fashioned from it a lifetime.
• There are days when you need someone who just wants to be your sunshine and not the air you breathe.
• As important in a trusting relationship as the truths you share are the lies you never have to tell.
• Learning is a lifetime process, but there comes a time when we must stop adding and start updating.
• Since the majority is always wrong, might we try one election day where all the losers take office?
• Sometimes it is the person closest to us who must travel the furthest distance to be our friend.
• Somewhere between the honest truth and the deceptive lie is the deceptive truth and the honest lie.
• To trade a childhood wonder for a plausible explanation – is there a worst trade one makes in life?
• An old belief is like an old shoe. We so value its comfort that we fail to notice the hole in it.
• Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one
• How foolish to spend our youth chasing after wealth only to spend our wealth chasing after our youth.
• We gain no easier advantage than by relentlessly pursuing our goal while others pursue an advantage.
• What greater blessing to give thanks for at a family gathering than the family and the gathering.
• Be it in the garden, the nursery or the bedroom, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand.
• For the most part, we carnivores do not eat other carnivores. We prefer to eat our vegetarian friends.
• How slight a nod it would take, how bare a smile, to give everyone you meet today a sense of worth.
• Now and then it’s good to list all the things you regularly do for which there was once a good reason.
• So often in life a new chapter awaits. You ride off into the sunset and discover it’s the sunrise.
• There are people who live their whole lives on the default settings, never realizing you can customize.
• You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock.
• I am not your dog, but if every time you saw me, you gave me a backrub, I would run to greet you, too.
• If God had wanted to be a big secret, He would not have created babbling brooks and whispering pines.
• No matter how you hurry, you will notice at the end of the day that you traveled at the speed of time.
• Sometimes, perhaps, we are allowed to get lost that we may find the right person to ask directions of.
• The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you.
• Ever wonder where you’d end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?
• The older I get, the less time I want to spend with the part of the human race that didn’t marry me.
• The trouble with having a stubbornness contest with your kids is that they have your stubbornness gene.
• There are subjects in which I wish to become knowledgeable, and subjects in which I wish to remain wise.
• There is no such thing as a list of reasons. There is either one sufficient reason or a list of excuses.
• A vacation trip is one-third pleasure, fondly remembered, and two-thirds aggravation, entirely forgotten.
• Opportunity is a parade. Even as one chance passes, the next is a fife and drum echoing in the distance.
• The shy and the extroverted have this in common – that they both fancy they are the center of attention.
• There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.
• There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.
• We are Godseekers all, though some be churchgoing believers and others pilgrims to an unknown shrine.
• You can avoid most of the sorrows of life, the only requirement being that you avoid all the happiness.
• As a gardener, I’m among those who believe that much of the evidence of God’s existence has been planted.
• What a unique treasure are the things we have learned to live without, for no thief can take them from us.
• Better to start up a thousand wrong roads than to spend your life going nowhere because you know the way.
• Charisma is not so much getting people to like you as getting people to like themselves when you’re around.
• The trouble with having a body is that people know it’s where you hang out and you don’t get any privacy.
• We are each the star of our own situation comedy, and, with luck, the screwball friend in somebody else’s.
• What do we ask of friendship except to be taken for what we pretend to be — and without having to pretend.
• Why try to be someone you’re not? Life is hard enough without adding impersonation to the skills required.
• Corporations no longer try to fit square pegs into round holes; they just fit them into square cubicles.
• Perception is a clash of mind and eye, the eye believing what it sees, the mind seeing what it believes.   
• The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser – in case you thought optimism was dead
• I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear.
• The most valuable lesson man has learned from his dog is to kick a few blades of grass over it and move on.
• There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed. If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.
• You always think you could have done more. That’s why you need a friend — to tell you you did all you could.
• It is sad when two people turn from the paths they’re traveling, and their paths go on to cross without them.
• On the sixth day, God created the artist, realizing no doubt that He had far from exhausted the uses of color.
• Sometimes I sit up late with my thoughts, reluctant to fall asleep and leave my thoughts alone by themselves.
• For lack of an occasional expression of love, a relationship strong at the seams can wear thin in the middle.
• In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you, there just has to be someone who wants to.
• Life is an educational process you can’t opt out of. You either learn the lesson, or you become the lesson.
• As a man, I’ve learned that there is nothing easier in married life than pleasing your wife with your cooking.
• How often in life we complete a task that was beyond the capability of the person we were when we started it.
• Occasionally ask, “What is the connection between what I want most in life and anything I plan to do today?”
• Seize every opportunity along the way, for how sad it would be if the road you chose became the road not taken.
• There is a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch.
• Time brings an end to everything. We should not mistake for a tragedy what is no more than the passage of time.
• To the student I would say, Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there’s a tough essay question.
• All your life you pretend to be someone else, and it turns out that you were someone else pretending to be you.
• As you seek new opportunity, keep in mind that the sun does not usually reappear on the horizon where last seen.
• You don’t realize how little accuracy there is in network TV reporting until they cover a story in your hometown.
• An old woman looks in a mirror, recalls a little girl with a rag doll, and wonders what became of the little girl.
• I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past.
• I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself. And I find sufficient purpose for my day. 
• The artist’s talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair.
• Toss your dashed hopes not into a trash bin but into a drawer where you are likely to rummage some bright morning.
• I have found that winning isn’t everything, and, in fact, in the relationships I most care about, it isn’t anything.
• I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.
• Life is not about discovering our talents; it is about pushing our talents to the limit and discovering our genius.
• The difference between friends and pets is that friends we allow into our company, pets we allow into our solitude.
• To find someone who will love you through success and failure is to discover how little life has to do with either.
• As parents, we guide by our unspoken example. It is only when we’re talking to them that our kids aren’t listening.
• So often the end of a love affair is death by a thousand cuts, so often its survival is life by a thousand stitches.
• Sometimes we can’t find the thing that will make us happy, because we can’t let go of the thing that was supposed to.
• The clash between child and adult is never so stubborn as when the child within us confronts the adult in our child.
• Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true
• We labor to make a house a home, then every time we’re expecting visitors, we rush to turn it back into a house.
• It’s not that I’m a Type B personality; it’s that I’m driven by a passionate all-consuming desire to take it easy.
• Just once it might be instructive to pretend you’re accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank.
• People who would never trespass on your property will trespass on your time, as if your time were not your property.
• The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you’re inclined to say, “in other words….”
• There comes a point in a relationship when you realize that you trust someone enough to let them keep their secrets.
• What a snapshot is to your life, your life is to eternity, so wouldn’t it be nice if eternity captured you smiling?
• History is man’s best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.
• Marriage is nature’s way of ensuring that a woman picks up some mothering experience before she has her first child.
• The imagination is a palette of bright colors. You can use it to touch up memories — or you can use it to paint dreams.
• There is a public me and a private me, who, if they were separate people, probably wouldn’t exchange Christmas cards.
• I’ve been looking over the list of spring chores I made up last fall, and darned if they aren’t fall chores, after all.
• To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.
• You will not find a soulmate in the quiet of your room. You must go to a noisy place and look in the quiet corners.
• An optimist is someone who isn’t sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play.
• As a means to success, determination has this advantage over talent – that it does not have to be recognized by others.
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, not forgetting to leave others be as you would have them leave you be.
• The little money I have – that is my wealth, but the things I have for which I would not take money, that is my treasure.
• I tell my child, if I seem obsessed to always know where you’ve been, it is because my DNA will be found at the scene.
• I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar
• It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional.
• More good has been accomplished by simple people seeking their own honest ends than by all the philanthropists in history.
• Stubbornly persist, and you will find that the limits of your stubbornness go well beyond the stubbornness of your limits.
• After years of buying clothes I intend to diet into, I’ll say this: the skeleton in my closet has some really nice outfits.
• Sometimes, in a relationship, we fail to put two and two together because we want so much to keep one and one together.
• The strongest marriage is between two who seek the same God, the strongest friendship between two who flee the same devil.
• You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.
• I don’t know that there are real ghosts and goblins, but there are always more trick-or-treaters than neighborhood kids.
• Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone’s feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.
• The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist.
• Folks who tell you, “Putting it off won’t make it any easier,” presume there’s a point where you plan to stop putting it off.
• If you can wear the hard times of your life as furrows on your brow, you can wear the good times as a twinkle in your eye.
• There are many things I do for amusement, but for happiness I like to gather up my memories and go for a walk in the rain.
• To a small child, the perfect granddad is unafraid of big dogs and fierce storms but absolutely terrified of the word boo.
• In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.
• Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.
• For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.
• Some day, man will travel at the speed of light, of small interest to those of us still trying to catch up to the speed of time.
• The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long before the next one puts the previous one into perspective.
• While I find that I can keep my nose out of other people’s business, I do have a curiosity as to their non-business activities.
• There are times when two people need to step apart from one another, but there is no rule that says they have to turn and fire.
• Ever wonder what crime you committed that you are confined to a small enclosure above your sinuses, under permanent skull arrest?
• The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality.
• Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.
• The Seven Deadly Sins are a litany of victimless crimes, compiled to distract attention from the bloody felonies of the righteous.
• There is always a perfectly good excuse, always a reason not to. The hardest freedom to win is the freedom from one’s excuses.
• A holiday cocktail party is where some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime.
• Psychologists now recognize that the need in some people to have a dozen cats is really a sublimated desire to have two dozen cats.
• I am a private person, but I will reveal this about myself: if you start massaging my shoulders, don’t expect me to tell you to stop.
• If minutes were kept of a family gathering, they would show that members not present and subjects discussed were one and the same.
• The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.
• There is in every artist’s studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist’s discipline prevailed against his imagination.
• Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it.
• If minutes were kept of a family gathering, they would show that “Members not Present” and “Subjects Discussed” were one and the same.
• In a household of toddlers and pets, we discover this rule of thumb about happy families, that they are least two-thirds incontinent.
• In the end you regret less the things you believed that weren’t true than the things that never came true because you didn’t believe.
• It’s curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past.
• You spend 90% of your adult life hoping for a long rest and the last 10% trying to convince the Lord that you’re actually not that tired.
• Be the master of your fate, be the captain of your soul, but do not hesitate, should the chance befall you, to be the slave of your heart.
• Do not ask that your kids live up to your expectations. Let your kids be who they are, and your expectations will be in breathless pursuit. 
• Try to discover the road to success and you’ll seek but never find, but blaze your own path and the road to success will trail right behind.
• Be it human or animal, touch is a life-giving thing. Has anyone ever had a stroke or a heart attack while cozied up with a pet?  I doubt it. 
• Happiness is life served up with a scoop of acceptance, a topping of tolerance and sprinkles of hope, although chocolate sprinkles also work.
• As important as it is to keep picking yourself up and brushing yourself off, it’s also important to stop tripping over your own two feet.
• Looking back, you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life- and it was you. It is not too late to find that person again
• Take no revenge that you have not pondered beneath a starry sky, or on a canyon overlook, or to the lapping of waves and the mewing of a distant gull.
• When I am gone, my love, do not look for me in the places we used to go to together. Look for me in the places we always planned to go to together.   
• Does it seem sometimes that you are always the one to break an embarrassing silence — and always by saying something more embarrassing than the silence?
• From an aunt, long ago: “Death has come for me many times but finds me always in my lovely garden and leaves me there, I think, as an excuse to return.”   
• Looking back, you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life and that person was you. It is not too late to become that person again.
• It’s like this. Father Time keeps pitching the years at us. We swing and miss at a few. We hit a few out of the park. We try not to take any called strikes.
• Sometimes two people need to step apart and make a space between that each might see the other anew, in a glance across a room or silhouetted against the moon.
• The difference between a liberal and a conservative is that one considers truth an inconvenience while the other opposes it on principle.
• Man will have replicated his own intelligence not when he teaches a computer to reason but when he teaches a computer to have a nagging feeling in its circuits.
• If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit.
• Conspicuously absent from the Ten Commandments is any obligation of parent to child. We must suppose that God felt it unnecessary to command by law what He had ensured by love.
• Fate, Chance, God’s Will — we all try to account for our lives somehow. What are the chances that two raindrops, flung from the heavens, will merge on a windowpane? Gotta be Fate.
• Today’s Parenting Tip: Treat a difficult child the way you would your boss at work. Praise his achievements, ignore his tantrums and resist the urge to sit him down and explain to him how his brain is not yet fully developed.
• What is it that we all believe in that we cannot see or hear or feel or taste or smell — this invisible thing that heals all sorrows, reveals all lies and renews all hope? What is it that has always been and always will be, from whose bosom we all came and to which we will all return? Most call it Time. A few realize that it is God.
• Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.
• Each day, awakening, are we asked to paint the sky blue? Need we coax the sun to rise or flowers to bloom? Need we teach birds to sing, or children to laugh, or lovers to kiss? No, though we think the world imperfect, it surrounds us each day with its perfections. We are asked only to appreciate them, and to show appreciation by living in peaceful harmony amidst them. The Creator does not ask that we create a perfect world; He asks that we celebrate it.

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