Friendship

-- Jack Kemp

A dog chased a hare and overcame it.  Now it would take a nip
at the hare, then wag its tail and caress it.  The hare said, "If you
are friendly, why do you bite me?  If you are hostile, why do you
wag your tail?

--Aesop

--Lord Chesterfield

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand;
he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both;
but he that gives good admonition and bad example,
builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

--Francis Bacon

A smile costs nothing, but gives much.  It enriches those who receive,
without making poorer those who give.  It takes but a moment, but
the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.  None is so rich or mighty
that he can get along without it, and none is so porr but that he can be
made rich by it.  A smile creates happiness in the home, fosters good
will in business, and is the countersign of friendship.  It brings rest to
the weary, cheer to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and it is
nature's best antidote for trouble.  Yet it cannot be bought, begged,
borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone
until it is given away.  Some people are too tired to give you a smile. 
Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has
no more to give.

--Anonymous

Happiness

Happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power, or all three.  It lies
in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in
perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the
even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease, and the very valley of
the shadow of death.

--Epictetus

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to
find it elsewhere.

--Agnes Repplier

For I am in want, and he has enough; and he only gives you the
appearance of happiness, and I give you the reality.

--Plato

To you, all you have seems small: to me, all I have seems great. 
Your desire is insatiable, mine is satisfied.  See children thrusting
their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the
nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out
again, and then they fall to tears.  -- "Let go a few of them, and
then you can draw out the rest!" -- You, too, let your desire go! 
Covet not many things and you will obtain.

--Epictetus

Very little is needed to make a happy life.  It is all within yourself,
in your way of thinking.

--Marcus Aurelius

Consider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and
vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves, at which
we are angry and vexed.

--Marcus Aurelius

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listening to himself apperas.

--Alexander Pope

Humor

--Anonymous

For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring
your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either
possible or honorable; the easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing
others, but to be improving yourselves.

--Plato

Step by step, since time began,
We see the steady gain of man.

--John Greenleaf Whittier

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which
is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

--Jonathan Swift

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.  Some books
are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to
be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with
diligence and attention.

--Francis Bacon

"Consider well -- weigh Strictly Right & Wrong,
Resolve not Quick -- but once Resolved be Strong."

--Inscription on "Sword of Prudence" at Holland House

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as
in what direction we are moving.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is the soul and not the strong-box which should be filled.

--Seneca

As 1996 comes to a close and we enter a time of holiday festivities,
it's a good time to do some rethinking about our values, our vision,
and how we want to spend our time for the rest of 1996 and in the
year to come.

Here's some questions to ponder over the next few weeks. While the
questions are phrased in the singular, you might want to take one or
two and discuss them with co-workers or with family members.

o What could I do in the last three weeks of 1996 to make it a better year?

o If I had complete control over my time, how would I want to spend it?

o What are my values and is my life "value-balanced?"

o If I focused completely on creativity and relationships, how would it
impact my job or my business?

o What fascinates me right now?

o What question would I like to find an answer for?

o What's my vision for 1997?

o What are my unique competencies that I should be focusing my time on?

o What am I doing that someone else could do better (and therefore I should
be delegating or subcontracting them)?

There's probably a hundred other interesting questions but it only takes a
couple and some quality reflection time to make some significant shifts.

Happy reflecting!

--Dick Jacobs

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real!  Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, -- act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time --

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

To a man who has any sense at all, no question can be more
serious than the meaning of human life.

--Plato

If there was a knowledge which was able to make men immortal
without giving them knowledge of the way to use that immortality,
there would be no use in it.

--Plato

As A Man Soweth

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We must not hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.

It is not just as we take it,
This mystical world of ours,
Life's field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.

A Shadow

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I said unto myself, if I were dead,
What would befall these children?  What would be
Their fate, who now are looking up to me
For help and furtherance?  Their lives, I said,
Would be a volume wherein I have read
But the first chapters, and no longer see
To read the rest of their dear history,
So full of beauty and so full of dread.
Be comforted; the world is very old,
And generations pass, as they have passed,
A troop of shadows moving with the sun;
Thousands of times has the old tale been told;
The world belongs to those who come the last,
They will find hope and strength as we have done.

The Tiger

--William Blake

Tiger!  Tiger!  Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire to thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand?  And what dread feet?

What the hammer?  What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil?  What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger!  Tiger!  Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame they fearful symmetry?

The Fly

--William Blake

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance,
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.

The Builders

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

"Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

--Alexander Pope

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never
beginning to live.

--Marcus Aurelius

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived.

--Henry David Thoreau

"May you live all the days of your life."

--Jonathan Swift

--Plato

--Henry David Thoreau

. . . The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is
called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate
city you go into the desperate country, and have to console
yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped
but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are
called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play
in them, for this comes after work, But it is a characteristic of
wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is
the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means
of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common
mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they
honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures
remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our
prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be
trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes
by as true to-day many turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere
smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would
sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot
do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new
deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance,
to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry
wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of
birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is not better,
hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited
so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has
learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have
no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has
been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for
private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have
some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less
young that they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet,
and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest
advice from seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably
cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment
to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they
have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am
sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about . . . .

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to
spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was
on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house
was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the
rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough,
weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at
night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and
window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the
morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I
fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them.
To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less
of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a
mountain which I had visited a year before. This was an airy
and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god, and where
a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed
over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains,
bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial
music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is
uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the
outside of the earth everywhere. . . .

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I
wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then
to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its
meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,
and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For
most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it,
whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily
concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and
enjoy him forever."

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we
were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes;
it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has
for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is
frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count
more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten
toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand;
instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on
your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life,
such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and
housand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live,
if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port
at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed
who succeeds. Simplify, simplify, Instead of three meals a day, if it
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and
reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German
Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever
fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded
at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called international
improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is
just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with
furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and
heedless expense, by want of calculation and worthy aim, as the
mission house-holds in the land; and the only cure for it, as for
them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity
of life and evaluation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is
essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk
through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt,
whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons
or like men, is a little uncertain. . . .

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are
determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a
stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches
to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven't any of
any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot
possibly keep our heads still. . . . Hardly a man takes a half-hour's
nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and
asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his
sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour,
doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell
what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as
indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that
has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,"-and he reads
it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged
out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the
while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this
world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think
that there are very few important communications made through
it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two
letters in my life-I wrote this some years ago-that were worth the
postage. The penny-post is, commonly, and institution through
which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts
which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I
never read any memorable news in the newspaper. If we read
of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one
house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown
up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad
dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,-we never
need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted
with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and
applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip,
and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. . .

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown
off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without
perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells
ring and the children cry,-determined to make a day of it. Why
should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be
upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called
a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger
and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With
unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it
whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should
we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let
us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
through the mud and slash of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the
globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston
and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and
philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks
in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no
mistake. . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are
really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in
the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.