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Thought-of-the-Day
October 2002 Archive

Previous Archives

DATE THOUGHT OF THE DAY
10/01/02"I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want." - Mark Twain
10/02/02"I learned this, at least by my experiment: that if you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams, and endeavor to live the life which you have imagined, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. You will put some things behind, you will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within you; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in your favor in a more liberal sense, and you will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is what they should be. Now put foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau
10/03/02"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming." - Goethe
10/04/02"If asked for a brief explanation, I would say that the existential vacuum derives from the following conditions. Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do - which is conformism - or he does what other people wish him to do - which is totalitarianism." - Dr. Viktor E. Frankl
10/05/02"Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself. I mean, do not be disheartened by your imperfections, but always rise up with fresh courage. How are we to be patient in dealing with our neighbor's faults if we are impatient in dealing with our own? He who is fretted by his own failings will not correct them. All profitable correction comes from a calm, peaceful mind." - St. Francis de Sales
10/06/02"Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
10/07/02"Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn't matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you're going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream." - Harvey Mackay
10/08/02"You are your own raw material. When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself." - Warren B. Bennis
10/09/02"The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him." - Stanislaw Jerszy Lec
10/10/02"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot
10/11/02"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to Heaven." - William Shakespeare
10/12/02"Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who, of themselves, are able to give purpose and direction to their lives." - Rudolf Steiner
10/13/02"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. Quality also marks the search for an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and mere usefulness achieved." - Willa A. Foster
10/14/02"The cocks may crow, but it's the hen that lays the egg." - Margaret Thatcher
10/15/02"We fall short of presenting all, or even a goodly part, of the news each day that a citizen would need to intelligently exercise his franchise in this democracy. So as he depends more and more on us, presumably the depth of knowledge of the average man is diminished. This clearly can lead to a disaster in democracy." - Walter Cronkite
10/16/02"And the day came when the risk [it took] to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom." - Anais Nin
10/17/02"Man's loneliness is but his fear of life." - Eugene O'Neill
10/18/02"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend." - Albert Camus
10/19/02"The best things and best people rise out of their separateness. I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise." - Robert Frost
10/20/02"I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it." - Harry S. Truman
10/21/02"Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life." - Sir William Osler
10/22/02"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp
10/23/02"Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." - New Testament, James i 19
10/24/02"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know." - William Saroyan
10/25/02"He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money." - Benjamin Franklin
10/26/02"As a people, we have the problem of making our forests outlast this generation, or iron outlast this century, and our coal the next; not merely as a matter of convenience or comfort, but as a matter of stern necessity." - William Howard Taft
10/27/02"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation." - Jean Arp
10/28/02"The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm." - Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay
10/29/02"We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist." - E. B. White
10/30/02"The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men." - Plato
10/31/02"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." - Mark Twain
10/01/02"Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their own personal happiness."- Leo Tolstoy


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