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  

  

Thoughts of an Older Fellow

"The older I get, the less time I want to spend with the part of the human race that didn’t marry me."


"Used to be that I’d wake up in the middle of the night with some bright idea.  Now I just wake up in the middle of the night."


"Old people are just like young people, except they think the accelerator is the brake."


"At my age the only way you meet new people is when you drive into their living room."


"My eyesight's gone, my reflexes are shot, and I can't stay awake, but thank God I can still drive."


There is a state of denial in old age that enables you to see yourself in a mirror and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”


"It's my luck that every time I feel I completely comprehend God’s plan, I don’t have a pencil with me."


"Most birth parents do a pretty good job when you consider that none of them interviewed for the position."


"Eventually all the things you acquire by dishonesty are gone, and you are left with only your dishonesty."


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


"The way to tell you're a professional, and not an amateur, is that you don't impress your relatives."



~~ Robert Brault