Time & Beauty - Growing Old & Staying Young

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts. (Martin Buxbaum)

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives. (Cato or Maurice Chevalier)

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. (Francis Bacon)

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance. (John Ruskin)

Charm... it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. (J.M. Barrie)

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. (Thomas Mann)

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)

I don't believe in vitamin pills. I swear by men, darling - and as many as possible. (Joan Collins)

The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation. -Pearl S. Buck

When I am an old woman I shall purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
(Jenny Joseph)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(Dylan Thomas)

I'm not young enough to know everything. (J.M. Barrie)

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young. (Dorothy Canfield Fisher or Arthur Pinero)

Children are a great comfort in your old age - and they help you reach it faster, too. (Lionel Kauffman)

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art. (Stanislaw J. Lec)

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. (Mark Twain)

Age and treachery will always triumph over youth and exuberance.

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. (John Barrymore)

It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place. (Abigail Van Buren)

Don't complain about growing old - many, many people do not have that privilege. (Earl Warren)

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age. (Lucille Ball)

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. (Jeanne Moreau)

You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake. (Bob Hope)

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday, but never remembers her age. (Robert Frost)

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older. Then it dawned on me. They were cramming for their finals.

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

Yesterday is history,

Tomorrow's a mystery.

Today's a gift,

That's why it's called the Present.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. (Carl Sandburg)

As a white candle in a holy place,

So is the beauty of an aged face.

(Joseph Campbell, "The Old Woman")

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age. (Victor Hugo)

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel. (Elizabeth Arden)

Old age is when you look the food over, instead of the waitress.

Few women admit their age... few men act it.

Inside every older person is a younger person -- wondering what the hell happened. (Cora Harvey Armstrong)

I refuse to think of them as chin hairs. I think of them as stray eyebrows. (Janette Barber)

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart. (Caryn Leschen)

A man has reached middle age when he is cautioned to slow down by his doctor instead of by the police.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. (Henry Ford)

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

You know you're getting old when you stop buying green bananas.

I don't plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to have face-lifts until my ears meet. (Rita Rudner)

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible (Judith Regan)

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise (Alden Nowlan)

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday. (John Wayne)

Another candle on your cake?

Well, that's no cause to pout,

Be glad that you have strength enough

To blow the damn thing out.

I love everything that's old - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine. (Oliver Goldsmith)

How to Stay Young: 

1. Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height. Let the doctor worry about them.

2. Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.

3. Keep learning. Never let the brain idle. An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and the devil's name is Alzheimer's.

4. Enjoy the simple things.

5. Laugh often, long and loud.

6. The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on.

7. Surround yourself with love, whether it's family, pets, friends, or whatever.

8. Cherish your health: If it's good, preserve it. If it's unstable, improve it as much as you can.

9. Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to anywhere except where the guilt is.

10. Tell people you love them, at every opportunity.

Thoughts on Mid-Life (for Women Only):

Mid-life is when the growth of hair on our legs slows down. This gives us plenty of time to care for our newly acquired mustache.

Mid-life is when you can stand naked in front of a mirror and you can see your rear without turning around.

Mid-life is when you want to grab every firm young lovely in a tube top and scream, "Listen honey, the Roman Empire fell and those will too."

Mid-life is when you look at your know-it-all, beeper-wearing teenager and think, "For this I have stretch marks?"

Mid-life means that you become more reflective.... You start pondering the 'big' questions. What is life? Why am I here? How much Healthy Choice ice cream can I eat before it's no longer a healthy choice?

Mid-life also brings with it an appreciation for what is important. We realize that breasts sag, hips expand, and chins double, but our loved ones make the journey worthwhile. Maybe our bodies simply have to expand to hold all the wisdom and love we've acquired.

Education, Books, Study, & Thought

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. (Aristotle)

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. (Sydney J. Harris)

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. (Roger Lewin)

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. (Maya Angelou)

If your mind goes blank, don't forget to turn off the sound. (Red Green)

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. (William Butler Yeats)

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. (Pete Seeger)

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! (Theodore Geisel)

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. (Emerson M. Pugh)

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. (Mahfouz Naguib)

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself. (Chinese Proverb)

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand those laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moved the constellations. (Albert Einstein)

Better build schoolrooms for the boy, than cells and gibbets for the man. (Eliza Cook)

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. (Galileo Galilei)

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience. (Archibald McLeish)

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. (Joseph Addison)

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. (Mark Twain)

Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. (Bacon, Essays of Studies)

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. (Carl Sagan)

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. (Anonymous English Professor, Ohio University)

A home without books is like a body without a soul.

An open mind is not the same as an empty mind.

A good book is like an unreachable itch. You just can't leave it alone. (Laura Bush)

At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems - the answer for all the problems of the world - come to a single word. That word is 'education.' (Lyndon B. Johnson)

You'll never have any mental muscle if you don't have any heavy stuff to pick up. (Diane Lane)

If all the rich and all the church people should send their children to public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. (Susan B. Anthony)

The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept everything they are offered. (Jean Piaget)

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Adams, John (1735 - 1826)

Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. (Werner Heisenberg)

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. (René Descartes)

Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet. (John Dryden)

If you ask mathematicians what they do, yo always get the same answer. They think. They think about difficult and unusual problems. They do not think about ordinary problems: they just write down the answers. (M. Egrafov)

 [The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. (Galileo Galilei)

To be a scholar of mathematics you must be born with talent, insight, concentration, taste, luck, drive and the ability to visualize and guess. (Paul R. Halmos)

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything. (Jules Henri Poincaré)

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. (Julian Barnes)

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books. (A. S. Byatt)

I respect faith but doubt is what gets you an education. (Wilson Mizner)

The motto of all the mongoose family is, 'Run and find out.' (Rudyard Kipling)

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. (Mark Haddon)

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. (René Descartes)

Essay by a New Teacher: 

Let me see if I've got this right. You want me to go into that room with all those kids, and fill their every waking moment with a love for learning. Not only that, I'm to instill a sense of pride in their ethnicity, behaviorally modify disruptive behavior, and observe them for signs of abuse, weapons, or drugs. I am to fight the war on drugs and sexually-transmitted diseases, check their backpacks for guns and raise their self-esteem. I am to check their heads occasionally for lice, maintain a safe environment, recognize signs of potential antisocial behavior, offer advice, write letters of recommendation for employment and scholarships, encourage respect for diversity, and oh yeah, teach!

I am to teach them patriotism, citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, how, where and why to register to vote, how to balance a checkbook and how to apply for a job. I am to decide who might be dangerous and/or liable to commit crimes in school or who is possibly being abused, and I can be sent to jail for not mentioning these suspicions to those in authority. I am to incorporate technology into the learning, but monitor all Web sites for appropriateness while providing a personal one-on-one relationship with each student. I am to make sure ALL students pass the state and federally mandated testing and all classes, whether or not they attend school on a regular basis or complete any of the work assigned. I am to communicate frequently with each student's parent by letter and phone.

I'm to do all of this with just a piece of chalk, a few books, a bulletin board and a big smile? And you want me to do ALL OF THIS and expect me to do it WITHOUT PRAYING?