Final Thoughts for the Merry Month

"When we sacrifice truth to some self-serving belief, we tend to believe it tenaciously, for it has come at such great sacrifice."


Every day ask yourself, "What would I do today if I were a better person?"


"The average voter is deaf and blind to politics, but a witness may be deaf and blind and still testify to the presence of a skunk."


"I'm not always sure what I saw or heard, but I know what I smelled."


"Few are humble, for it takes a self-esteem few possess."


"Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got."


Start to worry when the clips on the evening news that "some may find disturbing" stop disturbing you.


"If there's anything better than a God-given talent, it's a God-given day job."


"An important thing to get to know about a person is the unspoken ways they say they're sorry."


Sign over the gates of hell:  "Doesn't mean you're a bad person."


~~ Robert Brault

Thoughts for the Graduating Class

"Some times it's worth getting lost to see who will come looking for us."


"What you discover about people you try not to offend is that you can offend them without trying."


"You can live your life so as never to rock the boat, but you could have done that by not being born."


"Never try to be someone else in order to please.  Just be yourself and apologize as necessary."


"Once you find someone to share your ups and downs, downs are as good as ups."


"Always laugh off a slight insult, so that people will understand what it means when you're not laughing."


"As a job seeker, remember this:  You only lack experience if they want it done the same old way."


"Before you do anything, be sure you would do it the same way if you had it to do over again."


"Always invite into your success the people who helped you get there, for they are the ones most likely to wait for an invitation."


"What you must accept as a parent is that you can't always be there for your child without sometimes ruining everything."


A good speech has a beginning, a middle and an end, the best example being, "I love you."


~~ Robert Brault

Stirring in the Breeze

Thanks to Dawn Gilbert Drover at seabreezephotos.com for this!

Everything I Ever Said About Mom

"A mom forgives you all your faults, not to mention one or two you don't even have."


"If you have a mom, there is nowhere you are likely to go where a prayer has not already been."


"A mom reads you like a book, and wherever she goes, people read you like a glowing book review."


"What is a mom but the sunshine of our days and the north star of our nights."


"Every mom aspires to be the World's Greatest Mom, and by some crazy quirk of logic, most succeed."


"Eventually you realize that the reason God didn't always answer your prayers is that He was answering your mom's prayers."


"There is a time early in life when there seem to be countless reasons for happiness, and then you discover your mom is making them up."


"Every mom knows how to play the single mom and does so exactly to the extent her marriage requires."


"Every kid tries to find out how much he can screw up and still have mom blame herself."


"Through both their lives, a mom never stops chasing her child down to the water's edge."


"Eventually you realize that your mom knows exactly who you are and has been trying to break it to you gently all your life."


"A mother sees past our excuses to the real reason it's not our fault."


A mother always counts to ten
And never, never peeks
And always knows just where you hide
And there she never seeks
Until the very nick of time
Lest tears run down your cheeks.


~~ Robert Brault

Thoughts From An Otherwise Productive Week

"What you discover about a dream come true is that you must keep on dreaming it to make it stay true."


"Get involved.  You don't want to look back on your life and realize that you successfully managed to stay out of it."


"Every partial failure is a partial success, so if you haven't succeeded, maybe you haven't had enough partial failures."


"We are each the star of our own situation comedy, and, with luck, the screwball friend in somebody else's."


Hamlet at 73:  "To sleep, perchance to dream.  To awaken, perchance to go to the bathroom."


Movie plot by boy's mom:  "Boy meets girl.  Boy loses girl.  Mom bakes boy's favorite cake."


"Mom -- the person most likely to write an autobiography and never mention herself."


"There is nothing you regret less as a grandparent than the opportunities you sacrificed to become a parent."


"It's not that I'm a Type-B personality.  It's that I'm driven by a passionate, all-consuming desire to take it easy."


~~ Robert Brault

Short and Sweet

"As any artist can tell you, it is easier to reach perfection than to stop there."


"Sometimes we give up our dream to accept a larger role in someone else’s dream."


"See yourself always as cause, and perhaps a better world will be found among your effects."


"The trick to playing second fiddle is to play it like second Stradivarius."


"The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper."


"Dream small that your dreams may come true.  Dream large that you may always have a dream."


"Once you learn to do with what you have, it doesn't matter if you lose it, because you have learned to do with what you have."


"In the end, a child’s fear of the unknown doesn't stand a chance against his fear of not knowing."


"Why, so often, when someone offers us nothing but trouble, do we long that they offer it?"


"If you knew that some day you would live happily ever after, would you really want to start now?"


~~ Robert Brault

You Be The Quotesmith

One thought I tried out on Twitter this week fell pretty much flat.  I still can't think of how best to phrase it, so I thought I'd ask your help.  If you can come up with something that clicks, feel free to attach your name to it.


It's the idea of a mom trying to be both the sun in her child's life and the navigational north star -- the challenge of trying to provide both love and guidance and maybe providing too much of one at the cost of the other.  I tried it two ways, neither of which got much reaction.



"It is a story without a villain, the parent who tried to be the north star to a child desperate for the sun."


"We forgive a mom who was not always our north star but tried always to be our sunshine."



Maybe it would better to say, "What is a mom but the sunshine of our days and the north star of our nights."  What do you think?



Here are a couple of new thoughts that were better received on Twitter this week:

"So often the last place we think to look for happiness is where we left it."

"Insanity is a partial state of denial, observable in those of us unable to maintain a complete state of denial."



And a couple of oldies that were well received on Twitter:

"If you could eavesdrop on everything said about you, you'd spend most of your time waiting for the subject to come up."


"All I know about life is that it was the first thing my mom ever volunteered me for."



And, finally, I attained a bit of celebrity this week, when a character on the CBS hit series, "Criminal Minds" quoted me by name (April 11 episode):

"Worse than telling a lie is spending your whole life staying true to a lie."



~~ Robert Brault