Quote of the Day -- Susan Moon

It's not my fault when I have a senior moment any more than it was my fault when my hair turned gray. I'm just a human being, after all.  I've had a lifetime of junior moments, when one word follows another in logical -- and boring -- succession, when each action leads to the next appropriate action. For countless years, I have remembered to bring the pencil with me when I go downstairs to use the pencil sharpener.  I think I've earned the right to break free from the imprisonment of sequential thinking.

A senior moment is a stop sign on the road to life.  It could even be a leg up toward enlightenment.  So I stay calm, let the engine idle, and enjoy the scenery.  What happens next will be revealed in due course.

-- Susan Moon

Quote of the Day -- Jared Diamond

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

 – Jared Diamond

Quote of the Day -- Pico Iyer

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.  

-- Pico Iyer

Quote of the Day -- Roald Dahl

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. 

--Roald Dahl

Quote of the Day -- Oprah Winfrey

It is confidence in our bodies, minds and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn, which is what life is all about.

—Oprah Winfrey

Quote of the Day -- Jane Austen

...if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad...

 -- Jane Austen

Quote of the Day -- Bill Bryson

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you. 

-- Bill Bryson

Quote of the Day -- Nelson Mandela

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.  

-- Nelson Mandela

Quote of the Day -- Anne Lamott

You can’t run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero’s journey.

-- Anne Lamott

Quote of the Day -- Pearl S. Buck

I am a great believer in the seasons. Even here in my own world, I have no relish for sweet corn in January or strawberries in November. 

-- Pearl S. Buck

Quote of the Day -- Simon Sinek

Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left. 

-- Simon Sinek

Quote of the Day -- Laozi

Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. 

-- Laozi

Quote of the Day -- Mark Twain

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot. 

-- Mark Twain

Quote of the Day -- M.F.K. Fisher

It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.

-- M.F.K. Fisher

Quote of the Day -- Aristotle

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

 – Aristotle

Quote of the Day -- Albert Einstein

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.

-- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day -- John Maynard Keynes

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. 

-- John Maynard Keynes

Quote of the Day -- May Sarton

One does not ‘find oneself’ by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be. 

-- May Sarton

Quote of the Day -- Jill Lepore

The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it. 

-- Jill Lepore

Quote of the Day -- Noam Chomsky

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. 

-- Noam Chomsky

Quote of the Day -- Franklin Roosevelt

Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose…. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

 -- Franklin Roosevelt

Quote of the Day -- Irene Nemirovsky

After all, people judge one another according to their own feelings. It is only the miser who sees others enticed by money, the lustful who see others obsessed by desire. 

-- Irene Nemirovsky

Quote of the Day -- Robert Heinlein

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

 ― Robert A. Heinlein

Quote of the Day -- Margaret Mead

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.

-- Margaret Mead

Quote of the Day -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility. 

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Quote of the Day -- George Christoph Lichtenberg

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better. 

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Quote of the Day -- Plato via Anja Steinbauer

In Book 8 of the Republic, Plato describes how a democracy is unlikely to be a stable political solution, since it offers freedom but neglects the demands of proper statecraft. Plato therefore predicts an almost certain collapse of democracy and decline into tyranny, a total loss of freedom. Why does democracy involve a neglect of statecraft? Plato argues that in a system where political power (‘cratos’) lies in the hands of the people (‘demos’) it is not guaranteed, in fact is unlikely, that those best equipped to rule will get a chance to manage public affairs. Instead the loudest voices will dominate, irrational, ill-motivated decisions will be made and the complex arena of politics which is in need of careful ordering and management will turn into a crazy circus.

Quote of the Day -- Leo Tolstoy

If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.

-- Leo Tolstoy

Quote of the Day -- Kurt Vonnegut

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Quote of the Day -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. 

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson