Tag Archives: mark twain

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Sunday Quotes – Habits

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Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

St. Augustine

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Mark Twain

A habit is something you can do without thinking – which is why most of us have so many of them.

Frank A. Clark

Habits are safer than rules; you don’t have to watch them.  And you don’t have to keep them, either.  They keep you.

Frank Crane

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Sunday Quotes – Age

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Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.  Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Samuel Ullman

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

Douglas MacArthur

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

John Barrymore

I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now.

Author Unknown

First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.

Leo Rosenberg

Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.

Jim Fiebig

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?

Satchel Paige

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NHBPM – Sunday Quotes – Books

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Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
Mark Twain

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Oscar Wilde

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller

This post was written as part of NHBPM – 30 health posts in 30 days: http://bit.ly/vU0g9J
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Sunday Quotes – Humor

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A word to the wise ain’t necessary – it’s the stupid ones that need the advice.
Bill Cosby

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
Groucho Marx

As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.
Buddy Hackett

Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.
Cathy Guisewite

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Mark Twain

I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.
Stephen Fry

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Sunday Quotes – Happy Fathers’ Day

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He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. 

Clarence Budington Kelland

Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. 

Elizabeth Stone

A father is a banker provided by nature.

French proverb

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.  

Mario Cuomo

Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance.

Ruth E. Renkel

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

Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain but no evidence has yet been found for this


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What Is In Our Water

(unprofessionally done by me and my free clip art)

Recently, there’s been a lot of stories in the news about end-of-times/doomsday happenings.  Dead birds falling from the sky, fish and crabs dying.  Then there’s the you-can’t-be-serious stories that have reported this past week or so.  Which means, I have to ask…

WHAT HAS BEEN PUT IN OUR WATER!

And, just as a warning to everyone.  What started as a post for Wacky Wednesday with funny/weird stories has become a bit of a rant from a sick person on censorship and freedom of speech.  The first story about the new astrology I found funny.  And, there’s a funny picture at the end of the post with cute puppy dogs if you want to look at them.  But, somewhere along the line, I found a couple of stories about censorship, not wanting to offend and political correctness.  Even though the censorship may have been done with the best of intentions, we can’t try to censor words out of existence because they are offensive.  What we can do is make it a learning opportunity.

So, if you choose to not read the rest of the post, no offense taken.  (But check out the cute puppy dogs at the end.)

OK, here’s the funny story.  Did you feel different last week?  For a while, a lot of us had new astrological signs.  This was a big news story!  There was even a new sign called Ophiuchus  (Nov. 30 to Dec. 17).   It was horrific!  Some  people were upset!  Some didn’t want to change signs!  Or worse! Some people just didn’t care!

How can you not care about your daily astrological musings?  Do you think some of these things are fake or for entertainment purposes only?

Anyway, Minneapolis astronomy instructor Parke Kunkle wobbled the world of astrology by talking about how the earth has wobbled around its axis, shifting the zodiac signs.

Kunkle, who claims to not know what is his astrological sign, is now saying he was misquoted.   Do you feel like your old self now?  I guess silly season in the media can be anytime.

And, here’s the stories on censorship and freedom of speech.  Feel free to wobble on by if you’re not in the mood.

Now, I understand that over time,  we personally and as a society,  make changes that hopefully make us better people.  We progress, slow as that may seem.  Language is one of those areas.  The written word can evoke powerful emotions and ignite the imagination.

But, what is going on with someone feeling the need to change Mark Twain classics.  You can’t do that!

You don’t like racial slurs?  Good!  But, that doesn’t mean you ban the books or take out words that are now considered offensive.  What you do is use it as an opportunity to teach.  When I was young I and came across a word I didn’t know, I would either look it up in the dictionary or I asked someone.  There will always be something that will make us uncomfortable.  Something we really don’t want to talk about.  But, we need to talk about these things, learn from them and move forward.


Do you know who the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is?  This is from their website:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) is an independent, non-governmental organization created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) to administer standards established by its members, Canada’s private broadcasters.

The CBSC decided that the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” can not be played in Canada in its original form.  What happened is that a member of the LGBT community found the use of the word “faggot” offensive and wrote a letter of complaint to the CBSC.  Here’s a link to their decision.

Now, let me be perfectly clear about this.  If anyone feels that something is offensive and should not be aired, they absolutely have the right to submit a complaint with their reasons.  I also understand that when people have been discriminated against, they will have different life experiences and those experiences help form the character and beliefs of a person.  That can never be taken away from someone and we should never try and dismiss the person by making them feel bad, wrong or tell them that they are being oversensitive.  We are who we are because of our life experiences and need to respect that we, first and foremost, are all individuals no matter what race, religion, sexual orientation or whatever other label we use to define ourselves.

Words are a part of our lives, offensive or not.  We can’t ignore them, sweep them under the rug or not talk about them in the hopes that they will fade away.  We communicate with each other in so many ways and unless we evolve into a wonderful utopia, there will always be people being offensive and people being offended.  But, we can’t hide behind censorship in the hopes that whatever is causing our uneasiness will go away.

Here’s a couple of opinion pieces about the decision and freedom of speech, one from the Times Colonist and one from TheChronicleHerald.ca.

Well, this is the hopefully not-too-jumbled ramblings of a sick person who’s been taking cough syrup with alcohol and is groggily getting off the soap box.  So, check your water and maybe put tin hats on your loved ones.  Who knows what else is being directed our way in the interest of protecting us from ourselves.

(image via nippertown.com)