Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. ~Mark Twain
I used to kind of like that song "Can't Fight The Moonlight" from Coyote Ugly ... This puts a different spin on it: ------------------------------------------ Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, “How are you?” and no one says How aren’t you? Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight, thrashing in the dark. Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight. -Rumi
If someone were to pay you ten cents for every kind word you said about people and collect five cents for every unkind word, would you be rich or poor?
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
“Allow me to give my lord one last piece of counsel," the old man had said, "the same counsel I once gave my brother when we parted for the last time. He was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose him to mount the Iron Throne. A man grown with sons of his own, yet in some ways still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule. An Aegon, not an Egg. Kill the boy and let the man be born." The old man felt Jon's face. "You are half the age that Egg was, and your own burden is crueler one, I fear. You will have little joy of your command, but I think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
"If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures" ~ Gaius Musonius Rufus
From The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, should have read this a long time ago: BTW, Bach-y-Rita invented a haptic system that allowed the blind to see IN THE SIXTIES. You gotta wonder how many great ideas like this gets ignored and people just don't know about it.
I have often noticed that when chickens quit quarreling over their food they often find that there is enough for all of them. I wonder if it might not be the same with the human race.
You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”– Dr. Suess
Another from Doidge: "We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless—a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task."
You keep asking what it means to be a man, and the truth is, there’s not just one way. Every morning you get up there’s a thousand chances to do the right thing, be a good man. Hopefully you get most of them right; you’re not gonna get all of them right.
Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can "do" drugs, "have" sex, "make" babies, and "get" money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?
You may not have saved a lot of money in your life, but if you have saved a lot of heartaches for other folks, you are a pretty rich man.
