Dreams
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.
— Richard Bach, Illusions
I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous – everyone hasn’t met me yet.
— Rodney Dangerfield
If I wished to put a curse on a nation, I would invoke the gods to decree that it be governed by those who consider themselves to be the only true patriots in it.
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you will be a mile away and he won’t have any shoes.
— Unknown
How could I resist? After yesterday’s exhortation to embrace empathy, it seemed only fitting to also quote a brilliant variation on the old moccasins quote.
It turns out that the above quote is a perfect example of a paraprosdokian – a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part. Other good examples include my previous post from Ellen DeGeneres or my all time favorite, “When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did . . . and not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.”
A job done by half is never done right.
— Mom
I posted this quote for the sole reason that it always makes me smile. But as I looked at the list of names, and their sequence, I realized that, in a simplistic way, these simple words also reflect our evolution of philosophy and thought. Socrates lived more than 2,400 years ago and his influence on thought is legendary. Jean Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher at the peak of the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra was born only ten years after Sartre but has come to embody a later generation.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, economist