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To be seventy years young is sometimes
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

To be seventy years young is sometimes
far more cheerful and hopeful
than to be forty years old.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Related topics: Life Human-Nature Psychology

When in doubt, do it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience
an never go back to its old dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It is the province of knowledge to speak,
and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains,
but the thought which it suggests;
just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones
but in the echoes of our hearts.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Greatness is not in where we stand,
but in what direction we are moving.
We must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it -
but sail we must,
and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

 

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Some people are so heavenly minded
that they are no earthly good.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea,
never regains its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A mind, once stretched by a new idea,
never regains its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Except in cases of necessity, which are rare,
leave your friend to learn
unpleasant things from his enemies;
they are ready enough to tell them.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Then came Peter to him, and said,
Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me,
and I forgive him? till seven times?
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee,
Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
- Matthew 18:21-22

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.
- widely misattributed to Mark Twain

If the stars should appear
but one night every thousand years
how man would marvel and stare.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is not a matter of counting the years,
but making the years count.
- Michele St. Amand

It takes years to build up trust,
and only seconds to destroy it.
- Anonymous

And in the end, it's not
the years in your life that count,
it's the life in your years.
- Abraham Lincoln

It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.
- Eddie Cantor

The years teach much which the days never know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed;
if in terms of ten years, plant trees;
if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.
- Confucius

I have spent many years of my life in opposition,
and I rather like the role.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

I do not fear death.
I had been dead for billions and billions
of years before I was born,
and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
- Mark Twain

You can close more business in two months
by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying
to get people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth,
but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

Anger is a destructive emotion
that becomes instinctive over the years.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you plan for a year, plant a seed.
If for ten years, plant a tree.
If for a hundred years, teach the people.
When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest.
When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
- Kuan Chung

When a man you like switches from what
he said a year ago, or four years ago,
he is a broad-minded person who has courage enough
to change his mind with changing conditions.
When a man you don't like does it,
he is a liar who has broken his promise.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

Almost nothing you worry about today
will matter in a hundred years.
Think carefully about what you can focus on today.
Choose tasks that will actually make a positive difference
to your great-grandchildren.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

"Mother Teresa Prayer"
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
... Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you
of selfish, ulterior motives;
... Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
... Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
... Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
... Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
... Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
... Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
... Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
- although commonly attributed to Mother Teresa,
who kept a copy of this prayer on
the wall of her Calcutta orphanage,
this prayer was actually written by Kent Keith.

You can make more friends in two months
by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying
to get other people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie

Might I perhaps win my wings?
I've been waiting for over 200 years now, sir,
and people ARE beginning to talk.
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946 movie)

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits
and then complain that he's not the man she married?
- Barbra Streisand

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished
at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort,
should, when young, consider that he may one day become old,
and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.
- Joseph Addison

A person is smart. People are dumb,
panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew
the Earth was the center of the universe.
Five hundred years ago,
everybody knew the Earth was flat,
and fifteen minutes ago,
you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
- the movie Men in Black

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years.
To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
- Winston Churchill

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue.
If we have enough friends, we may go on for years,
intending to leave, talking about leaving -
instead of actually getting up and leaving.
- Erica Jong

I think and think for months and years.
Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false.
The hundredth time I am right.
- Albert Einstein

At twenty years of age the will reigns;
at thirty, the wit;
and at forty, the judgment.
- Benjamin Franklin

A man who views the world the same at fifty
as he did at twenty
has wasted thirty years of his life.
- Muhammad Ali

Personally, I have fond memories of playing
on slippery rocks on the banks of a rushing river
as a child and hitchhiking in college.
To those who say, "But times are different now,"
I reply that statistically life is much safer now
than in the 1950s, with regard to both crime and accidents.
What has changed is our attitudes.
In those years, a broken leg from falling off a swing
or the back of a tractor was just part of childhood -
an excuse for gathering autographs.
Today that broken leg would be a source
of outrage and probably lawsuits.
I long for a simpler time when life was taken less seriously.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Before printing was discovered,
a century was equal to a thousand years.
- Henry David Thoreau

Once you have seen the truth
you must make the decision to let go
of the pain, anger, and resentment you have been holding on to.
This requires you to take action.
If you are attached to your pain, resentment,
and self-righteousness, and addicted to your emotional reactions,
this will be a difficult step for you.
Taking action requires letting go of the very thing
you have been holding on to for so many years.
There is comfort in what we find familiar,
even if we are experiencing pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering itself becomes the familiarity we seek.
It takes absolute faith in yourself
plus courage, will, and discipline to let go.
But once you let go, it will be as if
the weight of the world has been taken off your shoulders.
In this process it is important to forgive
not just the others in our lives, but also ourselves.
For most people, giving ourselves
the gift of forgiveness is very challenging.
- Sheri Rosenthal

No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old,
and that I know.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work
without having to talk
because for years I had been giving myself out in words.
- Albert Schweitzer

Everyone has an opinion on many subjects
and is ready to share those opinions -
labeling them as "truth."
Sometimes it is relatively easy
to filter out these opinions.
Upon hearing an ad for the latest
weight-loss powder on late-night TV,
our skepticism leaps to our defense.
However, if we have heard the same opinion for years
from our parents, friends,
government officials, or religious leaders,
we are more likely to believe without questioning
than to raise our filter of skepticism
and ask the hard questions.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

One of the greatest titles we can have is "old friend."
We never appreciate how important old friends are until we are older.
The problem is we need to start our old friendships when we are young.
We then have to nurture and grow those friendships over our middle age
when a busy life and changing geographies
can cause us to neglect those friends.
Today is the day to invest in those people
we hope will call us "old friend" in the years to come.
- Grant Fairley

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you
across thousands of miles
and all the years you have lived.
- Helen Keller

I have found out in later years that we were very poor,
but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Today's acorns grow into the oak trees of thirty years hence.
But what acorns are we sowing today?
Imagine what an acorn-sized bit of prejudice or hatred would grow into.
Imagine what an acorn-sized bit of pollution can become.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years
to have breakfast together,
but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
- Winston Churchill

Fourscore and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- Abraham Lincoln

We are asking the nations of Europe
between whom rivers of blood have flowed
to forget the feuds of a thousand years.
- Winston Churchill

The architect must be a prophet...
a prophet in the true sense of the term...
if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

If you have been divorced, you know it hurts -
especially if your marriage had lasted many years.
Whatever the circumstances of your relationship,
and whatever the nature of its ending,
there is always grief and regret -
perhaps regret over the ending,
or perhaps regret over not ending the relationship sooner -
or perhaps both.
Nonetheless, move past the grief and regret.
No matter how painful, divorce, like all endings,
opens the door to new beginnings.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The wine of youth does not always
clear with advancing years;
sometimes it grows turbid.
- Carl Jung

Books constitute capital.
A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years.
It is not, then, an article of mere consumption
but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men,
setting out in life, it is their only capital.
- Thomas Jefferson

Do feuds ever end?
Only when both sides shake hands,
and agree that there is no winner, no loser,
only people who have wearied of fighting
and desire to live in peace.
For many years, Northern Ireland was locked
in a murderous and seemingly unending feud.
The key to ending the feud was a shared commitment
that peace was more important than vengeance.
That is always the choice to be made.
The organizers of an April 10, 2009
joint Protestant-Catholic commemoration
of the Northern Ireland dead,
comprised of members of the once-outlawed Sinn Fein
as well as their once-avowed enemies,
referred to, "the terrible, random nature
of death in war and civil conflict."
Some lessons have been learned, many more remain.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Regrets and their cousins, resentments,
are a huge cause of self-inflicted suffering.
Sometimes it takes years of psychotherapy
to gain freedom from regrets about what you did or did not do,
and freedom from resentment over what others did or did not do.
Sometimes it takes a lifetime of self-talk to remember
to put the past in the past where it belongs.
However, sometimes a simple symbolic act can help immeasurably
to grant ourselves freedom from the past.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We are born at a given moment, in a given place and,
like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year
and of the season of which we are born.
Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.
- Carl Jung

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University
and learned within 24 hours to be ready
to speak at the drop of a hat,
and I learned something more, the trustees were expected
to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Four Stages of Public Opinion
I (Just after publication): The novelty is absurd
and subversive of Religion and Morality.
The propounder both fool and knave.
II (Twenty years later): The Novelty is absolute Truth
and will yield a full and satisfactory
explanation of things in general -
The propounder a man of sublime genius and perfect virtue.
III (Forty years later): The Novelty won't explain
things in general after all, and therefore is a wretched failure.
The propounder a very ordinary person advertised by a clique.
IV (A century later): The Novelty a mixture of truth and error.
Explains as much as could reasonably be expected.
The propounder worthy of all honor
in spite of his share of human frailties,
as one who has added to the permanent possessions of science.
- Thomas Henry [T. H.] Huxley

Training - training is everything; training is all there is to a person.
We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature;
what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training.
We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own;
they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable
or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden
by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms
contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors
that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam
or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been
so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.
And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage,
this pathetic drift between the eternities,
is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life,
and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me:
the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.
- Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Choose to be as a young child -
fully awake, eager for the next experience.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To the young child, all life is a great adventure -
when did we grow so dull and brittle.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To keep your thinking young, stay curious.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie


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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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