Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You are currently browsing Colleen’s articles.
Tags: Quoting
For much of my life, I’ve been the answer person. Colleen knows. Sometimes, I don’t know how I know. The answers perhaps living for eternity in my belly, surfacing with Dewey decimal precision at the exact moment needed. Other times, springing from countless books and passages read and remembered.
This knowing, as one might imagine, is the perennial blessing and curse. Knowledge IS power! That same intelligence, however, when called upon by former friends to settle a score (true story), not so great.
Lately, and perhaps brought upon by this dreaded virus, my knowing has been wholly inadequate. The anxiety of it! When? Where? Why? What about this? The space where my personal Dewey might previously reside, an echoing vacuum keeping me up at night, hours and hours tick-tocking by.
What to do? Initially, I searched myself, one inquiry after another, ad nauseum. Then, with a surprising flourish, the solution to my question. Succinct and really quite brilliant in its simplicity:
All in good time. Answers will come, or not. Be patient and forgiving. Forget the query and go, go, go.
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
Marie Curie
Tags: Quoting
Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness. Are you willing to do these things even for a day?
Henry Van Dyke
Tags: Quoting
