He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, by Joseph Addison

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort,
by Joseph Addison

When men are easy in their circumstances,
they are naturally enemies to innovations.
- Joseph Addison

If you wish to succeed in life,
make perseverance your bosom friend,
experience your wise counselor,
caution your elder brother,
and hope your guardian genius.
- Joseph Addison

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable
who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.
- Joseph Addison

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels
from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved
by the person whom he entirely loves.
- Joseph Addison

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess,
we act and think in vain,
and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.
- Joseph Addison

To say that authority, whether secular or religious,
supplies no ground for morality
is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
- Joseph Addison

What sculpture is to a block of marble,
education is to the soul.
- Joseph Addison

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...
It's about learning to Dance in the Rain.
- Vivian Greene

Doubt is the vestibule which we all must pass through
before we can enter the temple of truth.
- Osho

Wonder what opportunities you pass, unwittingly,
because your hands are so busy clasping
what you think you have always known.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Do not seek to bring things to pass
in accordance with your wishes,
but wish for them as they are,
and you will find them.
- Epictetus

A wise man will make haste to forgive,
because he knows the true value of time,
and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
- Samuel Johnson

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars;
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St. Augustine

We cling to our own point of view,
as though everything depended on it.
Yet our opinions have no permanence;
like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
- Zhuangzi

I expect to pass through this world but once.
Any good therefore that I can do,
or any kindness that I can show to my fellow-creature,
let me do it now.
Let me not defer or neglect it,
for I shall not pass this way again.
- William Penn

Dreams pass into the reality of action.
From the actions stems the dream again;
and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
- Anais Nin

A great gift requires two people,
the giver and the receiver.
Think of a football pass -
skillfully catching the pass, the gift,
is fully as important, and difficult, as throwing it.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Look closely... See with new eyes...
Don't just pass by what is familiar without a thought.
Pay attention and look closely.
There is beauty - there is discovery -
there in a whole new world hiding
beneath the face of the familiar.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
its loveliness increases;
it will never pass into nothingness.
- John Keats

And you would accept the seasons of your heart
just as you have always accepted
that seasons pass over your fields
and you would watch with serenity
through the winters of your grief.
- Khalil Gibran

Old friends pass away, new friends appear.
It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives.
The important thing is to make it meaningful:
a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere,
and many of us will have to pass
through the valley of the shadow of death
again and again before we reach
the mountaintop of our desires.
- Nelson Mandela

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on.
It is never of any use to oneself.
- Oscar Wilde

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman
in the midst of this world,
where each person is clinging to his piece of debris?
What's the proper salutation between people
as they pass each other in this flood?
- The Buddha

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent
will not pass until there is
an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world
must first come to pass in the heart of America.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I always pass on good advice.
It is the only thing to do with it.
It is never of any use to oneself.
- Oscar Wilde

The world turns aside to let any man pass
who knows where he is going.
- Epictetus

One minute you're in the lunchroom at Glenwood High
and you ... blink and you're 40,
you blink again and you can see movies
at half price on a senior citizen's pass.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, or to put it more accurately,
ask not for whom the toilet flushes.
- the Woody Allen movie Celebrity

A man is a god in ruins.
When men are innocent, life shall be longer,
and shall pass into the immortal,
as gently as we awake from dreams.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show
by what road it will pass to destruction,
to wit: by consolidation of power first,
and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
- Thomas Jefferson

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary;
new, universal, and more liberal laws
will begin to establish themselves around and within him;
or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor
in a more liberal sense,
and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
- Henry David Thoreau

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.
- widely misattributed to Mark Twain

And in the end, it's not
the years in your life that count,
it's the life in your years.
- Abraham Lincoln

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed;
if in terms of ten years, plant trees;
if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.
- Confucius

If the stars should appear
but one night every thousand years
how man would marvel and stare.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is not a matter of counting the years,
but making the years count.
- Michele St. Amand

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth,
but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

When a man you like switches from what
he said a year ago, or four years ago,
he is a broad-minded person who has courage enough
to change his mind with changing conditions.
When a man you don't like does it,
he is a liar who has broken his promise.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

Anger is a destructive emotion
that becomes instinctive over the years.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Almost nothing you worry about today
will matter in a hundred years.
Think carefully about what you can focus on today.
Choose tasks that will actually make a positive difference
to your great-grandchildren.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you plan for a year, plant a seed.
If for ten years, plant a tree.
If for a hundred years, teach the people.
When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest.
When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
- Kuan Chung

You can make more friends in two months
by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying
to get other people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie

"Mother Teresa Prayer"
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
... Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you
of selfish, ulterior motives;
... Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
... Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
... Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
... Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
... Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
... Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
... Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
- although commonly attributed to Mother Teresa,
who kept a copy of this prayer on
the wall of her Calcutta orphanage,
this prayer was actually written by Kent Keith.

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits
and then complain that he's not the man she married?
- Barbra Streisand

I have spent many years of my life in opposition,
and I rather like the role.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

I do not fear death.
I had been dead for billions and billions
of years before I was born,
and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
- Mark Twain

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue.
If we have enough friends, we may go on for years,
intending to leave, talking about leaving -
instead of actually getting up and leaving.
- Erica Jong

You can close more business in two months
by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying
to get people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie

Might I perhaps win my wings?
I've been waiting for over 200 years now, sir,
and people ARE beginning to talk.
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946 movie)

Personally, I have fond memories of playing
on slippery rocks on the banks of a rushing river
as a child and hitchhiking in college.
To those who say, "But times are different now,"
I reply that statistically life is much safer now
than in the 1950s, with regard to both crime and accidents.
What has changed is our attitudes.
In those years, a broken leg from falling off a swing
or the back of a tractor was just part of childhood -
an excuse for gathering autographs.
Today that broken leg would be a source
of outrage and probably lawsuits.
I long for a simpler time when life was taken less seriously.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Once you have seen the truth
you must make the decision to let go
of the pain, anger, and resentment you have been holding on to.
This requires you to take action.
If you are attached to your pain, resentment,
and self-righteousness, and addicted to your emotional reactions,
this will be a difficult step for you.
Taking action requires letting go of the very thing
you have been holding on to for so many years.
There is comfort in what we find familiar,
even if we are experiencing pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering itself becomes the familiarity we seek.
It takes absolute faith in yourself
plus courage, will, and discipline to let go.
But once you let go, it will be as if
the weight of the world has been taken off your shoulders.
In this process it is important to forgive
not just the others in our lives, but also ourselves.
For most people, giving ourselves
the gift of forgiveness is very challenging.
- Sheri Rosenthal

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished
at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain

Everyone has an opinion on many subjects
and is ready to share those opinions -
labeling them as "truth."
Sometimes it is relatively easy
to filter out these opinions.
Upon hearing an ad for the latest
weight-loss powder on late-night TV,
our skepticism leaps to our defense.
However, if we have heard the same opinion for years
from our parents, friends,
government officials, or religious leaders,
we are more likely to believe without questioning
than to raise our filter of skepticism
and ask the hard questions.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

One of the greatest titles we can have is "old friend."
We never appreciate how important old friends are until we are older.
The problem is we need to start our old friendships when we are young.
We then have to nurture and grow those friendships over our middle age
when a busy life and changing geographies
can cause us to neglect those friends.
Today is the day to invest in those people
we hope will call us "old friend" in the years to come.
- Grant Fairley

A person is smart. People are dumb,
panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew
the Earth was the center of the universe.
Five hundred years ago,
everybody knew the Earth was flat,
and fifteen minutes ago,
you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
- the movie Men in Black

A man who views the world the same at fifty
as he did at twenty
has wasted thirty years of his life.
- Muhammad Ali

If you have been divorced, you know it hurts -
especially if your marriage had lasted many years.
Whatever the circumstances of your relationship,
and whatever the nature of its ending,
there is always grief and regret -
perhaps regret over the ending,
or perhaps regret over not ending the relationship sooner -
or perhaps both.
Nonetheless, move past the grief and regret.
No matter how painful, divorce, like all endings,
opens the door to new beginnings.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old,
and that I know.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

The wine of youth does not always
clear with advancing years;
sometimes it grows turbid.
- Carl Jung

At twenty years of age the will reigns;
at thirty, the wit;
and at forty, the judgment.
- Benjamin Franklin

I think and think for months and years.
Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false.
The hundredth time I am right.
- Albert Einstein

I have found out in later years that we were very poor,
but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort,by Joseph Addison

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He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort,
by Joseph Addison