learning

Posted: June 7, 2011 in learning
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Getting an education is hard, staying ignorant more so.

Love may cover a multitude of sins but it won’t put up with bad grades.

Invest in your own education; buy a plane ticket.

It is the mark of the modern educated mind to know many points of view but have none of its own.

A classic is a book known to the public by one of its decontextualized lines.

An alphabet is a song that sings a million words.

A wild creature is won with food, a reluctant learner with a story.

A good education includes some needed, unwanted lessons, how to fail, quit, grieve and come up swinging.

The educated person knows all the questions and mistrusts most of the answers.

We invest the least in what we should invest the most — our preschool teacher’s salaries.

The first rule of the educator is to not interfere with curiosity.

Every few years American educators make a brilliant discovery — how to educate American children.

When we teach to the test we ignore the best.

doubt

Posted: June 6, 2011 in doubt
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True faith loves healthy doubt.

The big questions survive all the small answers.

Every new door is opened with old doubt.

The true doubter doubts doubt.

Doubt weeps faith’s grief.

Doubt is merely faith’s time out.

Doubters ask questions believers think they have answered.

Doubt is the switch-back path to belief.

The tenacious doubter is the fanatical believer.

Our doubts are our friends; they take us by the arm and lead us from untruth.

God loves doubt; it is proof that what he created has finally begun to think up to its potential.

Those who love science love doubt.

Doubt everything to know anything.

morality

Posted: June 4, 2011 in morality
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Morality’s deep structure arises out of sacred texts, legal precedent and our mothers’ boyfriends.

Political morality isn’t.

Morality’s scurrility diminishes virility.

Moral — it’s choral.

Morality is the posture we adopt toward the people we love.

Fear isn’t morality’s mother; that would be love.

Soteriology ever trumps morality.

Immorality is the ruining of someone else’s moraltiy.

A person is diminished every time a wrong is justified.

Morality is not a whacking stick; it’s a map to guide a trip.

wealth

Posted: June 2, 2011 in wealth
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What we don’t get makes us who we need to be.

Wealth is our world’s way to health.

Those who romaticize poverty haven’t experienced it.

You can measure the wealth of a person by the number of children and animals who sleep near them each night.

Getting when we should have been giving is like taking a great photographic shot and finding we have included our own shadow.

Raise children so they know serving is getting.

The good life satifies need — not greed.

Carry something rich inside, for others, an interior cry.

Poverty is the overwhelming presence of absence.

Opportunity goes missing when compassion goes fishing.

To live justly, beg for the opportunity to come face-to-face with horrific need.

Death’s door will open to family, not money.

Having everything and being nothing is a recipe for self-loathing.

Good is giving, not getting.

Too much wealth is like a fast freight train going by too close — it leaves us all rattled.

nature

Posted: June 1, 2011 in nature
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A flat screen can’t compete with a natural scene.

Nature is a restaurant; the trick is to stay off the plate.

The bathroom keeps us connected to wilderness

We preserve wilderness to appreciate civilization.

When the Jacaranda blooms, the earth blushes.

Go to the woods to discover beauty and simplity, but rub on tick and mosquito repellant first.

The romantic movement was defeated by the chigger.

Redwoods absorb fog; great souls absorb truth.

The solar wind blows, the arrora lights; the seer is silent, the mind brightens.

If you can’t visit the Grand Canyon, visit a rose petal.

A sunrise a day keeps the doctor at bay.

Before drawing conclusions about nature, remember it includes you.

 

 

 

 

happiness

Posted: May 30, 2011 in happiness
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Never let happiness interfere with a good sulk.

Enjoy unhappiness; it’s that feeling you have just before you are happy again.

Men are happy when women are doing things; women are happy when men are helping them.

It’s better to laugh like an idiot than despair like a genius.

Happiness is being smacko; it’s twice as good is being whacko.

Be happy when people compliment you; be even happier when you  compliment yourself.

Like a hawk bathing in a bird bath, so happiness surprises in unexpected places.

Happiness resides in what we think, not in keeping from the brink.

Happiness is in what happens inside of us on the way home from making someone else happy.

Having something to do makes us happy; having someone to do it with even happier.

Be happy that all the unhappy things you thought would happen didn’t.

Always take along food in case of unhappiness, and take extra in case you meet unhappy people.

good

Posted: May 28, 2011 in good
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A sliver spoon is not a boon.

The good is only limited, by shrunken thoughts concerning it.

The ancients valued the good, moderns the goods.

Aging means rewriting what good is, after you find your glasses.

Order is good, freedom better.

Law is good, grace better, love best of all.

The good of only one person is despotism.

The summum bonum lies deep within our happiness with each other — and breakfast.

The good future hides in the DNA of the present.

Good is what we don’t do.

marriage

Posted: May 27, 2011 in marriage
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Couples must stay together to have any chance of driving the children away.

Stay married; the food gets better.

A long marriage is like a long war; both end with a tired peace.

We fix the house but not the spouse.

Marriage has a certain sacred advantage — the tax deduction.

The “open sesame” of marriage is “I’m sorry.”

A marriage is a deep, lasting, meaningful merging of dreams — and viruses.

Falling in love is emotional; falling back in love is intentional.

Long marriages includes wise silences.

Walking is our first chance to escape from our mothers; marriage is discovering we never will.

Marriage is to have and to hold; divorce is to halve and to fold.

We chiefly miss the most important criteria for picking a spouse — the thermal factor.

The secret to having  a good marriage is to make ‘em laugh.

If woman came from man’s rib then her battle is to not go back.

Marital infidelity is like shooting the person you were assigned to guard while they are asleep.

Divorce happens in the heart before it happens in the court.

inception

Posted: May 24, 2011 in inception
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Great thinkers trust neurological flickers.

First we imagine, then we pretend; tentatively we begin and finally we star.

Starting is the hardest part of finishing.

The beginning is the fastest way to the end.

Inception is nine-tenth of direction.

Don’t do what you have always wanted to do — tomorrow.

Inception is by the pen, realization by the shovel and demolition by the guillotine.

Being — it’s doing.

The clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the printing press and the digital book first appeared in the mind.

Starting things that fail is the best training for starting things that succeed.

celebrity

Posted: May 24, 2011 in celebrity
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To get your way too much is way too much for the rest of us.

Money can’t buy you love, but it can make you obnoxious.

A celebrity is an average person on steroids.

Defeat your vice; be famous to your wife.

The passion to be famous has inspired many people to become adequate.

A simple endearment is better than a big name.

The punishment for being famous is in what you have to do to maintain it.

We make famous what we are afraid to become.

Celebrity worship is disappointment’s analgesic.

To be a celebrity is to be a freak – freakishly beautiful, freakishly talented or freakishly smart.

Everyone is a celebrity to one.

Celebrities are the known unknown.

A fortune pleases a celeb, but the wise are content with what they have.

Talent isn’t enough; one also needs a guy who knows a guy.


 

proverbs

Posted: May 17, 2011 in proverbs
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A good proverb is like a good foot-bridge troll, short-statured, sturdy and armed with a vicious bite.

A properly placed proverb is like a perfectly executed murder — untruth taken out with one shot.

Proverbs galore are the ultimate bore.

Maturity is when your weight is at its maximum and you know the paremiological minimum.

Proverbs tell the truth, with a stutter.

Fewer words, more truth.

Wise sayings stab sense into a few psyches, but the masses die unwounded by the truths they repeat.

The difference between a wise-ass comment and a proverb is print.

One man’s adage is another man’s baggage.

He came; he sawed; he proverbed.

A proverb a page makes the writer a sage.

A wise proverb is an A+ cliché.

You can wax proverbial, trying on adverbial.

Proverbs are refrigerated truth.

Modern life is a fire hose of information, but sometimes we need only a sweet drop of truth.

As the hummingbird sips the honeysuckle, so the wise sip aphorisms.

Sometimes we need small to process large.

Axioms anvil the mundane into the sublime.

hope

Posted: May 16, 2011 in hope
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Hope breeds content.

Lipstick is hued hope.

Hope invented the keyless door handle.

Google reinvented hope.

One stumble doesn’t ruin an approach march, not does a short fall end a long climb.

In every try there is a hopeful cry.

The sun is bright and love is long, and both still shine when all is wrong.

Tomorrow’s adventure is found in today’s advance.

We pick our way through what we see to get to what we hope to be.

There are two possibilities for tomorrow, but what will you do if you live?

Both butterflies and children dry and fly.

creativity

Posted: May 16, 2011 in creativity
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Apathy dives; creativity flies.

Like a flower in a walk, ideas form a mental block.

Creativity is the smile of charity.

Creativity is math – subtract words, add paint, multiply lines, divide space.

As the aquifer waters the fields, so the mind irrigates the arts.

Art finds fuel in fun.

We know we were meant to create something when we cannot, not do it.

Feeling is nothing; doing is everything.

Be creative: Machine gun apathy, stab laziness, bludgeon selfishness, bomb fear.

Yesterday is repurposed by the creative choices of today.

death

Posted: May 14, 2011 in death
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Life is a short race; on your mark, get set — die!

We can cheat death with a just life.

If life weren’t so scary, death wouldn’t make us so afraid.

Always one step ahead of the grim reaper is the exultant sower.

We cannot knock on heaven’s door; we can only call out respectfully from the approach.

The final lesson we teach our family is how to die.

We prepare for death by going to sleep each night.

Death is a gate that swings open on life.

Scared to death is rare; afraid to live is epidemic.

To weep bitterly over the loss of one and remain unmoved by the loss of millions — such is the colossal smallness of our empathetic reach.

Of all the forces of the earth, death is the most vanquished; every time anything dies after having reproduced itself, death loses again.

forgiveness

Posted: May 12, 2011 in forgiveness
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To err is human, to forgive, humane.

Forgiviology requries no apology.

Hammer, be hammered; forgive, relive.

What is offended in an instant may take a life time to forgive.

To forgive is not to forget, but to remember without  punishing.

Forgive; set two people free.

When we see that we have done the very thing we condemn, we begin to be able to forgive.

To refuse to forgive is to begin to harm oneself.

An unintended offense may be intentionally forgiven.

Those who suffer the radiation of resentment, must smear on the sunscreen of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not an emotion; it is a choice that heals an emotion.

To be deeply hurt is to begin to understand what it means to forgive.

We can forgive something in another when we have accepted it in ourselves.

To begin to forgive yourself is to begin to forgive the world.

Don’t count on going to heaven if you are still judging the hell out of everyone else.

water

Posted: May 9, 2011 in water
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Water is the world.

The three wonders of the seen — ice, water and steam.

Water renews; hope brews.

Want fun: find water.

Water like sweets delights what it beats.

Sun and sea, death’s repartee.

Live large; take hot showers.

We are born in a puddle; we die in a desert.

Humans sixty per cent, the earth’s surface 70 per cent, an apple  84 per cent, our lungs ninety per cent —  life survives, almost drowning.

Baptism and tsunamis have this in common — death followed by life.

The ancient world was won on the water, the modern in the air, the post-modern in cyberspace.

The aquifer waters the fields and the spirit waters creativity — for those with a mind to drill.

wisdom

Posted: May 9, 2011 in wisdom
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Wisdom exists in how each of us handles our own foolishness.

The mouth of the wise isn’t swallowing flies.

The wise know when less is more — more or less.

The wise win the majority’s one.

Wisdom ducks extremes — except when dressed like queens.

Wisdom is loving — thinking.

Wisdom judges the formula.

Fools are discontent; the wise to reality assent.

The wise feed on words; fools feed on herds.

Eclectic is wisdom’s electric.

Work and play most everyday.

Complicated is overrated.

literature

Posted: May 9, 2011 in literature
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Without the sun, the world would die of cold, without stories, of boredom.

Poetry — word concentrate.

Words can zoom and zoar and zive, fly upside down and come alive.

A canon, some dogma, a couple of martyrs and a few prophets and literature is a  religion.

Words heal the brain; sentences heal the soul; books heal the world.

Literature and history share this, a passion to distort what happened.

Literature is the refrigerator that preserves tommorrow’s word entree.

As the artist knifes paint on canvases so the writer spatulas words onto minds.

Modern certainty about uncertainty is uncertain of uncertainty.

It only takes a lull to trepanate a skull.

Literature is culinary art with a slice of propaganda thrown in.

One of the primary functions of literature is to entertain; what doesn’t delight doesn’t sell.

Every story ever written is every person’s story who has ever lived.

seeing

Posted: May 8, 2011 in seeing
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Doubt carries a microscope; faith packs a lens of hope.

Only love sees what hides from hate.

The wise know they are blind, and see; fools are sure they see, and are blind.

As the astronomer scans the sky for galaxies, so the wise scan experience for insight.

We visit art galleries; they teach us how to see reality.

The natural scene informs the screen.

Look longer into people’s eys; pry shorter into their lives.

Where one sees an atom another sees a universe.

White light contains all the colors, wise judgment all the facts.

Most people see the future through the past; visionaries see pure future.

As the cat misjudges the leap so the student overestimates her ability.

The foolish watch a bad man die and rejoice; the wise see him die and grieve.

Patriotism sees only one country; wisdom sees many countries that can live as one.

Modern world leaders don’t know how to sit down and talk, only how to rise up and shoot.

romance

Posted: May 3, 2011 in romance
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Romance is awkward; love is more so.

Lipstick’s fine, soft stain, lies mainly on the brain.

Fools trade lovers; the wise invest — and hold.

Broken hearts created the music industry.

What love’s labor loses, labors love to regain.

Kiss a girl; kiss the world; miss the kiss, regret the Ms.

To fall in love is to love to fall.

The last word on love is that it lasts.

Love not brief needs no relief.

 

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