Quotations

Quality, Price and Value

It's unwise to pay too much, but it's more unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that's all. When you pay too little you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it's well to add something for the risk you take. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

~John Ruskin
(1819 ~ 1900)

Time

Time is that inexplicable raw material of everything. With it all is possible. Without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle - an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! Your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life.  It is yours. It is the most precious of possession; no-one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no-one receives either more or less than you receive.

In the realm of time, there is no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will and the supply will never be withheld from you. 

Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you.

I have said the affair is a miracle, is it not? You have this twenty-four hours of daily time to live. Out of it you want to spin health, pleasure, money, contentment, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul.

Its right use, its most effective use is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness, the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friend, depends on that.

If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle ones whole life indefinitely. 

We shall never have any more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.  

~ Arnold Bennet

Anybody

 This is a story about four people, named

 Everybody, 

Somebody,

Anybody, and

Nobody.

  There was an important job to be done and

Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it,

but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that,

 because it was the job of Everybody.

 Everybody thought that Anybody could do it

but Nobody realized that

Everybody would not do it.

And so it came to pass, 

that Everybody blamed Somebody

when Nobody did

what Anybody Could have.

~Author Unknown

Character

"If the past has taught us anything is is that every cause brings its effect, every action has a consequence. 

The Chinese have a saying, "If a man plants melon seeds, he will reap melons. If he sows the seed from beans' he will reap beans." And this is true of everyone's life - good begets good, and evil leads to evil.

True enough, the sun shines on the saint and the sinner alike, and too often it seems that the wicked prosper. But we can say with certainty that with the individual as with the nation, the flourishing of the wicked is an illusion. 

For unceasingly, life keeps books on us all.

In the end, we are all the sum total of our actions.

Character cannot be forfeited nor can it be put on and cast off as if if were a garment to meet the whim of the moment. Like the markings on wood, which are ingrained in the very heart of the tree, character requires time and nurturing for growth and development.

Thus also, day by day, we write our own destiny, for inexorably, like the rings on a tree, we become what we do".

Assorted Topics

Because there is a natural storytelling urge and ability in all human beings, even just a little nurturing of this impulse can bring about astonishing and delightful results."

~ Nancy Mellon

 

The screenwriter Robert McKee says, "Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact."

~ Patricia Fripp

 

You cannot put off living until you are
ready, life is fired at you from a point blank range. 

~ Camus

 

I am done with great things and big plans, great intuitions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.  

~ William James

 

 

Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.

~B. C. Forbes

 

 

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

~Herman Melville

 

...about four-fifths of the contents of nearly every home could be given away with good effect to that home. But the things given away might go on to poison some other home. So why not at once destroy undesirable things .. make and end of them?

~Frank Lloyd Wright, "Prairie Architecture", Modern Architecture, 1931.

 

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

 ~Theodore Roosevelt

 

Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.

~ Albert Einstein

 

Not I - nor anyone else, can travel that
road for you. You must travel it yourself.

~ Walt Whitman

 

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

~David Dunham

 

What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.

~Richard Harkness, The New York Times, 1960

 

 

When people look back upon their lives, they ask
three questions that determine their sense of whether it was meaningful:
   Did I give and receive love?
   Did I become all I can be?
   Did I leave the planet a little better?

~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying
 

 

What we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world in which we are living that will open to us the transcendental.

~ Joseph Campbell

 

 

If you don't design your own life plan, chances are
you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess
what they have planned for you?
Not much.

~ Jim Rohn

There are many ways of going forward, but there is only one way of standing still.

~ Goethe

 

 

We tend our pain meticulously through the familiar process of thinking about it. The more we think around our emotional pain the more we cripple ourselves with the artificial intensity of it. . . . We could allow our pain to dissolve into the sky-like open-ness of direct experience; but somehow we feel more secure with our pain as a reference point.

~ Ngak’chang Rinpoche     

 

Watch a child get a vaccination and see how he ignores the hundreds of square inches of skin surface that feel fine, perversely squeezing his whole attention into the hundredth of a square inch that’s in pain. Most of us are experts at this,  fixating on our stresses and traumas, maintaining them as carefully as an album of family photos.

~Dean Sluyter - The Zen Commandments

 

 

 

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