To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
|
To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.
|
When you engage in systematic, purposeful actin, using and stretching your abilities to the maximum, you cannot help but feel positive and confident abut yourself.
|
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
|
Everything we enjoy in society is a direct result of the accumulated learning derived from millions of mistakes. No mistakes, no progress. Yet we still look at making a mistake as embarrassing, wrong, an act bordering on sin. If youre making mistakes, it means youre doing new things, taking risks, stretching yourself. Youre growing, learning. And isn't the journey, the experience, not the destination, what life is all about?
|
Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backward, lying down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.
|
[Reactions ? now and stretching into the future ? are likely to include anxiety, irritability, depression, anger,] all the emotions, intensified, ... Maybe guilt. I survived and friends and family members haven't. Why did I survive and not others?
|