I am not a ‘wise man,’ nor . . . shall I ever be. And so require not from me that I should be equal to the best, but that I should be better than the wicked. It is enough for me if every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.
I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy...
Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
But I'm after medals more than anything. Championships don't get taken away from you but records do, so I think I'd rather have medals at every championships rather than times. A world record would be a bonus, but I'm still only 25 in 17 days.
How often do the poor daydream of a better life? Plenty, no doubt, and where does it get them? It is the poor who begin with a daydream and realize at some point that they have to get up, roll their sleeves, and start doing something about those day ...
The Voice There is a voice inside of you That whispers all day long, "I feel this is right for me, I know that this is wrong." No teacher, preacher, parent, friend Or wise man can decide What's right for you--just listen to The voice that speaks insi...
Knowledge empowers people with our most powerful tool: the ability to think and decide. There is no power for change greater than a child discovering what he or she cares about. (Speech about Global Warming read on the National Mall for the 40th anni...
When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked me why they should let me into the program. I looked at them unblinking and said, 'Because I'm going to change the world some day. And I'm giving you the chance to say, We knew her when.
Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or no...
To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acq...
I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
One of our group said that a lot of people in church spend a lot of time correcting each other these days, but in order to correct another person in love, you really have to know that person. Only then, she told us, can you practice the kind of commu...
It is better to do what you love for work, but if it is your day job that enables an unpaid passion, then your life is still sweeter. What is important is that you make time for your dreams, not whether or not you get paid for it.
Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either ...
I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways. But I also see why it's appealing - I've had that little high you get from posting stuff online. But then you think, 'Did I need to say that?' I've explored that ...
Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the con...
Sometimes we make the process more complicated than we need to. We will never make a journey of a thousand miles by fretting about how long it will take or how hard it will be. We make the journey by taking each day step by step and then repeating it...
I was moved beyond words. The train ride over the mountains from lake Titticaca to Cusco reminded me of Africa where I grew up; and 4 days walking on the Inca Trail, then more in the jungle, just magnificent - time, space, and splendour. Our planet i...
I keep warning and warning, and nobody seems willing to listen. One of these days someone is going to wake up to the fact that I'm serious when I say never to attack my sister without looking over your shoulder for me. (Rhoan)
I hope you learn how to slow down and not let your life pass you by while you're watching the idiot box. Life's short, and one day you'll wake up and look in the mirror and realize you look like King Tut.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable...
