Old age is like a plane flying through a storm.
Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.
You can’t stop the plane, you can’t stop the storm, you can’t stop time.
So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely.
Golda Meir, 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci
There are many outside the church who seem to be inside,
there are many inside the church who seem to be outside...
There are some whom the church has whom God has not,
there are some whom God has whom the church has not.
Attributed to St. Augustine
Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.
Ted Kooser
His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools —
the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans —
and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase,
“You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him,
and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations,
though friends are, if possible, an event more fair.
Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil, Simone Weil: A Life