Saint Patrick's Day

The grass is always greener on the other side, until you jump the fence and see the weeds up close.
- Albert Grashuis

Latet anguis in herba. (There's a snake hidden in the grass.)
- Virgil, 70 - 19 BC

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
the rains fall soft upon your fields
and, until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of his hand.
- Irish Blessing

About: Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, died on 17 Mar in the year 461, and has been regarded as a saint in Ireland since that time. (Never formally canonized, when the Roman church first published a list of saints Patrick was included.) The first known secular celebration of his feast day was a quarter-millennium ago, on this day in 1756 at the Crown and Thistle Tavern at New York City. He was one of the great missionaries, largely responsible for converting the Irish from their pagan heritage to Christianity, but the story about driving the snakes into the sea has no historical support and never heard any good reason why kids that forget to wear green today will get pinched!

Water

Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface.
- Confucius

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
- Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862

The cure for anything is salt water; sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen, 1885 - 1962

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

22 Mar is World Day for Water. Save water!

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."
- Benjamin Franklin

Marriage

Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces; marriage is also three meals a day, sharing the workload, and remembering to carry out the trash.
- Dr Joyce Brothers

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
- George Levinger

There is no greater excitement than to support an intellectual wife and have her support you. Marriage is a partnership in which each inspires the other, and brings fruition to both of you.
- Millicent Carey McIntosh, 1898 - 2001

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
- Simone Signoret, 1921 - 1985

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.
- Sydney Smith, 1771 - 1845

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
- Ogden Nash, 1902 - 1971

Edward R. Murrow

One major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

ifficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

The politician is ... trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
- All from Edward R. Murrow, 1908 - 1965

About: It was on 9 Mar 1954 that Edward R. Murrow attacked Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Communist witch hunt on the CBS news program "See It Now".

Proverbs

All sunshine makes a desert.
- Arabic proverb

The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
- Chinese proverb

Act in the valley so that you need not fear those who stand on the hill.
- Danish proverb

He who is outside the door has already a good part of the journey behind him.
- Dutch proverb

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- Greek proverb

Teeth placed before the tongue give good advice.
- Italian proverb

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
- Japanese proverb

Fish, to taste good, must swim three times: in water, in butter, and in wine.
- Polish proverb

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.
- Slovenian proverb

A man is not honest simply because he never had a chance to steal.
- Yiddish proverb

When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.
- Sufi proverb

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.
- Lebanese proverb

Seeds

The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.
- Dr. Felice Leonardo Buscaglia

A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of forests. I too will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high.
- Fiona MacLeod, pen name of William Sharp, 1856 - 1905

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.
- Hal Borland, 1900 - 1978

However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
- Lin Yutang

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
- May Sarton, 1912 - 1995

The only hope we have is our children and the seeds we give them and the gardens we plant together.
- Richard Brautigan, 1935 - 1984

Speeches

An educated man ... is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.
- Alan Simpson

Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
- Ambrose Bierce

My father gave me these hints on speech-making: Be sincere, be brief, be seated.
- James Roosevelt, 1907 - 1991

A speech is a solemn responsibility. The man who makes a bad thirty-minute speech to two hundred people wastes only a half hour of his own time. But he wastes one hundred hours of the audience's time - more than four days - which should be a hanging offense.
- Jenkin Lloyd Jones, 1843 - 1918

A speech is like a love affair. Any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.
- Lord Mancroft

Coins

A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft.
- Alan Watts

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
- Jerome Seymour Bruner

A war undertaken without sufficient monies has but a wisp of force. Coins are the very sinews of battles.
- François Rabelais, 1494 - 1553

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.
- Jules Renard, 1864 - 1910

Money never remains just coins and pieces of paper. Money can be translated into the beauty of living, a support in misfortune, an education, or future security. It also can be translated into a source of bitterness.
- Sylvia Porter

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Dr Seuss

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat.
I'm all ready you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.
- All from Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904 - 1991

About: Theodor Seuss Geisel was born at Springfield, Massachusetts on 2 Mar in 1904. He wrote "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" in the summer of 1936, inspired by the rhythm of the engines on an ocean liner. After his vacation he extended his notes into a full book and saw it rejected by 28 publishers. In 1954 he wrote "The Cat in the Hat" based on a suggestion that children could only deal with 250 words, he used 220.

Counting

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.
- Dr. Robert H. Schuller

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
- Eric Hoffer, 1902 - 1983

It's not the quantity, but the quality of friendships that counts. That's the difference between 'counting off' and 'counting on.'
- Jimmy Tom

People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.
- Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
- Jean Paul Getty, 1892 - 1976

Science and Religion

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
- Lyman Beecher, 1775 - 1863

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
- Freeman John Dyson

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
- J. B. S. Haldane, 1892 - 1964

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
- Galileo Galilei, 1564 - 1642

Thomas Edison

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninty-nine percent perspiration.

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
- All from Thomas Alva Edison, 1847 - 1931

About: Thomas Alva Edison was born at Milan, Ohio on 11 Feb in 1847. Through hard work and tenacity (and endless self-promotion) he became the most prolific and successful inventor of his era. Although Edison grabbed a fair amount of credit for things that weren't his inventions (Nikolai Tesla was his most obvious victim), there is no doubt that he was responsible for the first electric incandescent light, not to mention the electrical utility business.

Montaigne

It's not victory if it doesn't end the war.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.

I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own. I would be rich of myself and not by borrowing.

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.
- All from Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533 - 1592

About: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on 28 Feb in 1533 and soon embarked on one of the strangest courses of education imaginable. Instead of allowing the boy to become accustomed to great wealth on the family estate, he was sent to live with a peasant family for three years. His father wanted Michel to learn Latin as his first language and hired a German tutor (who spoke no French) to teach him, then banned the use of French in the Chateau when Michel was within hearing. To make sure that he learned to delight in music, a musician was hired to constantly attend the boy and play whenever his interest flagged. Montaigne was an influential mediator between Roman Catholic and Protestant partisans (he and his father were Catholic, his mother was Jewish but a practicing Protestant).