Throughout my adult life I have had the habit of writing down quotes and phrases that appealed to me because they seemed to reveal some truth about life and the human condition. At various times I have looked back through my scrapbook and found words of wisdom, solace and direction. This blog is my attempt to share some of those Words to Live By with others.
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Recent Posts
- “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth”
- Wear the World Lightly
- All Perception is Fundamentally an Illusion
- We have a universe within ourselves
- “We are survival machines… blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”
- Can Do Attitude in a Can’t Do Body
- Industry is the Enemy of Melancholy
- “I do not understand; I pause; I examine”
- Dancing Our Sorrow Away
- Doughnut Economics
- Sorry is a Sacrament
- Nothing is forever in this world, even your problems
- There is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing
- The Life of the Dead is Placed in the Heart of the Living
- Feeling Like a Stranger Nobody Sees
- 3 a.m., Hello My Friend
- There is a Season for Everything Under the Sun
- My Mind is in Darkness
- There is no Right or Left, there’s only Up and Down
- The Prayers of All Good People are Good
- The Dirt of Gossip Blows into my Face
- Keep On the Sunny Side
- I feel Alive when I’m Doing it
- R.I.P. RBG
- An Appreciation of my Wife on her 60th Birthday
- No Gain without some Pain
- ‘Tis a Fearful Thing to Love
- The Eye is the Jewel of the Body
- Memorable and Admirable
- “Why can’t I find my words?”
- Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism
- It’s Not Dark Yet, But it’s Getting There
- To err is human; to forgive Divine
- Quality is never an Accident
- Making Pies
- “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
- Nothing wrong with this place that a busload of Nuns couldn’t fix
- Tombstone vs Ashes, I can’t decide…
- Every time I see a river, feels like I’m back in love again
- “There’s a way to do it better – find it”
- “They are so happy, they don’t know how miserable they are”
- Greatest of All Time
- Time out of Mind
- “And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths”
- “Seek Moderation in everything, except Knowledge…”
- The Forever War
- Is it not better to see yourself truly, than care about how others see you?
- Kiss me, I’m 21% Irish…
- Reason without compassion and empathy leads to a moral void
- That wild unknown country where I could not go wrong
- Parable of Perhaps
- “Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage”
- Life While-You-Wait
- “The price, my dear, is you instead”
- House of Broken Dreams…
- “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”
- Suffering is wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’t want
- “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”
- Going Inside to Greet the Light
- “If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan”
- “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”
- “You do what you do best, not what’s best to do”
- “The sweetest woman in the world can be the meanest woman in the world – if you make her that way”
- “Of our greatest acts we are ignorant”
- Don’t let your ‘don’t voice’ dominate your thoughts
- “Some people are more formed for dividing than uniting”
- “There is something in the forest to cure most anything that bothers you.”
- “Watch out for your blind spots”
- “Ocean in view! O! the Joy!”
- “Get your facts first and then you can distort ’em as much as you please”
- Mathematics is the Poetry of Logical Ideas
- “The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
- “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”
- “love that well which thou must leave ere long”
- “You knew who I was when you picked me up…”
- “The line between life and death is not thicker than an eyelid”
- “You’re nobody if you don’t get booed sometime”
- Fall always carries with it a touch of sadness
- “I’m helpless like a rich man’s child”
- “I’ve been up so long, it looks like down to me”
- “I value my religion, because like a batting average, it sets a standard by which I can measure myself”
- “A Good Day is a Laugh and a Cry”
- “The best way for a father to love his children, is for him to love their mother”
- Genius makes a virtue of its limitations
- If you love, there will be sorrow…
- Solitude is the precondition for having a conversation with yourself
- “The harder the life, the finer the person”
- “I’m a Christian – but fun loving…”
- Make Hay While the Sun Shines
- The Deplorable Word
- “Soft is Stronger than Hard”
- “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”
- “I used to walk like a giant on the land…”
- “The Fight is Fixed”
- “Memento Mori”
- “The crow of anxiety always finds some branch to land on”
- “Though the doer of the kind deed forgets, the recipient always remembers”
- “Imperfection is the wound that lets God in”
- “Father Time is Undefeated”
- “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy”
- “He not busy being born is busy dying”
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Words to Live By... 
October 28th, 2021 at 2:35 AM
Thanks, Alan! Have thoroughly enjoyed several of your posts, particularly your awesome review of Patty Griffin’s “Making Pies.”
And even though it is now a great many years later, am so sorry for the devastating loss you told of in that review. It’s true that, as you noted in another blog post, “the life of the dead is placed in the heart of the living” – as when Griffin’s now-elderly Italian woman shared that photo of her long-ago Greek sweetheart.