I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

— E.B. White

 

It’s amazing. Everywhere you go they’re doing fireworks shows in Florida. It’s no wonder they’re having so many wildfires down there.

— WPKN programmer Jeff Wignall

 

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur. (Translation: Everything said in Latin sounds profound.)

 

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working when you get up in the morning, and doesn’t stop until you get to the office.

— Robert Frost

 

Most people are paid just enough to keep them from quitting, for working just hard enough to keep from getting fired.

 — George Carlin

 

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re still a rat.

— Lilly Tomlin

 

When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, “The nearest.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson from his obituary/tribute to Henry David Thoreau

Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.

— Marcel Marceau

Many of us still do hike, swim, fish, bird watch, sleep on the ground or paddle a boat on vacation, and will loll like a lizard in the sun any other chance we have. We can’t help grinning for at least a moment at the sight of surf, or sunlight on a river meadow, as if remembering in our mind’s eye paleolithic pleasures in a home before memories officially began.

— Edward Hoagland

In spite of their happy-as-a-lark disposition, morning people don’t elicit a lot of sympathy. They are in the same league as trust-fund brats, Brazilian fashion models, descendants of European royalty, and thin people on a diet. If you find it hard to commiserate with a size 6 acquaintance who complains about her weight, you know what I mean.

— Véronique Vienne, MSN Underwire columnist

It’s okay if you mess up. You should give yourself a break.

– Billy Joel

 

The bulls and bears aren’t dangerous on Wall Street – it’s the bum steers.

– Anonymous

 

You can’t be happy just by chance. You have to dig up happiness by the roots every morning and plant it in your mind, and tend it all day. Quite a job, but it pays.

— Margaret Flint

Love does not express itself on command; it cannot be called out like a dog to its master – merely because one thinks he needs to see it. Love is autonomous; it obeys only itself.

   — Robert C. Murphy

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

— Mother Theresa

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

— Groucho Marx

Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.

— Lord Chesterfield

 

When we think we’re separate, we lose power. Whenever I say “my,” I have lost my power. Power is not my power; it is not enlarging oneself as a separate individual. It is only gainable as part of a larger whole. Then you communicate with the rest of yourself - which may be a tree. You, reciprocally, are moved by the universe. Whenever you shut down connectedness, you get depressed. Psychic awareness breaks in as a gift. It’s fearful to know we’re connected to everything in the universe, because then we’re not responsible.

 — Glenda Taylor, We Are The Web

 

(Readers are invited to submit quotations for Gleanings by mail or email to editor@thebee.com)