Favorite Sayings/Passages

"Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken

I think these are the greatest words penned by a poet (Wordsworth) "Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”

>3 Tess_W: There is sure a lot of consolation in reading Wordsworth. Speaking of Romantic poets, I was always taken by this line in Blake: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is not an immense world of delight closed by your senses five."

>4 nohrt4me2: Love Blake, too!

"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, 'A whole I planned, youth shows but half.' Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!"--Robert Browning

>6 LadyoftheLodge: Haven't read Browning in forever, but I sure like the idea that age is a time for reaping the harvest of what we learned as young people. I have so much more confidence and experience now that I am old, and I think I am more encouraging of others.

"Whisky, gambling, and Ferraris are better than housework." - Françoise Sagan

>7 nohrt4me2: My husband and I have only been married five years, both of us widowed previously--he was married 40 years and I was married 28 years. We used that verse from Browning as the "toast" at our tiny reception. It seemed to be made just for us.

Quotes to live by -

'Life is either a daring adventure... or nothing." Helen Keller

"You must be the change you seek in the world." Gandhi

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none." Shakespeare

"Entertain possibilities!" Storyteller Pat Peterson

"It is not the words of my enemies that hurt, it is the silence of my friends." M.L. King Jr.

>10 nrmay:
“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” P. J. O’Rourke

“Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”
Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning

“The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Upstream, Mary Oliver

“There are actually no things at all. Instead, the universe is made up of countless events. Even what might seem like a thing—a stone, say—is really an event taking place at a rate we can’t register. The stone is in a continual state of transformation, and on a long enough timeline, even it is fleeting, destined to take on some other form.

“In the ‘elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time—only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate possibilities and relations’” Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” ― Zen saying

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan

"Live till you die." Emitt Rhodes, American singer-songwriter.

>13 TempleCat: That’s a wonderful collection. Thanks!

'In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king." Erasmus

When interacting with this over sixties group I often recall the passage from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Yeomen of the Guard", sung by the Yeomen Warders of the Tower of London:

In the autumn of our life,
Here at rest in ample clover,
We rejoice in telling over
Our impetuous May and June.
In the evening of our day,
With the sun of life declining,
We recall without repining
All the heat of bygone noon...

I trust we are all at rest in ample clover as we rejoice in telling over our impetuous May and June, recalling without repining all the heat of bygone times, using this group as the medium!

For those who are not familiar with the Yeomen, popularly known as the Beefeaters, Wikipedia tells us they are old soldiers who:

are ceremonial guardians of the Tower of London. In principle they are responsible for looking after any prisoners in the Tower and safeguarding the British crown jewels. They have also conducted guided tours of the Tower since the Victorian era. All warders are retired from the Armed Forces of Commonwealth realms and must be former warrant officers with at least 22 years of service. They must also hold the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal...

There is currently one female beefeater, only the second in history (BBC).

Old age ain't no place for sissies. --nobody knows who first said it, but Bette Davis had it stitched on a sampler pillow and had her photo taken with it.

I was reminded of that saying when my husband, at the height of Michigan's third COVID surge in April, called to say, "I don't want to alarm you, but I started having chest pains in the Home Depot and am in the ER."

And *that* reminds me of Dorothy Parker's saying, "What fresh hell is this?" whenever the phone rang.

"Keep me by you," he said. It was almost a prayer, but like most of us he prayed for one thing, and set his life on course for elsewhere.
— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, p. 89

What is freedom, after all, if it is not the freedom to be one's self?
— Deborah Rudacille, The riddle of gender, concluding sentence, p. 292

"I dwell in possibility." Emily Dickinson

"Aging is not a disease but a privilege... you are bearers of dreams charged with memory"

Pope Francis (link)

When I would find really well phrased sentences in a book, I would copy them out and keep them on my work computer. When I retired, I deleted everything personal, and I lost most of them. Here are a few that I remember.

“You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds.” Plutarch, as quoted by J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello.

“If you lie to your husband – even about something so banal as how much you drink – each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away.”
— Mary Karr, Lit.

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”
― Iain Banks, Transition