Never tell me the odds.

Naked I seek the camp of those who desire nothing.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. -Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.

Feast of Philip & James, Apostles What was God to do in the face of the dehumanizing of mankind -- this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself? So burdened were men with their wickedness that they seemed rather to be brute beasts than reasonable men, reflecting the very likeness of the Word. What, then, was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Savior Jesus Christ?... Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for Him in two opposite directions, down among created things, and things of sense. The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, half-way. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body. [Continued].

A leap year Is never a good sheep year.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.

What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets; May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.

Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.

Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly, Never met - or never parted, We had never been broken-hearted.

The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned pricks more deeply and draws more blood.

Arouse the mind without resting it on anything.

Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures To restless action spurs our fate! Cursed when for soft, indulgent leisures, He lays for us the pillows straight.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a moveable body.

Men take only their needs into consideration, never their abilities.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels diseases, softens every pain, Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.

...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.

Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours.".

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved-to write a book.