Some favorite quotations.

"One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears-by listening to those you would persuade."

Dean Rusk

"Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But, when I follow at my leisure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the ground."

Ptolemy

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

Goethe

"If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try."

Marianne Moore

Note: I think it's interesting that of my five children my daughter and one son, ages 15 and 16 at the time, independantly chose this as their favorite.

"We all perform...all the time, deliberately or unintentionally."

Richard Avelon

"I stepped from plank to plank, a slow and cautious way, the stars about my head I felt, about my feet the sea. I knew not but the next would be my final inch, this gave me that precarious gate some call experience."

Emily Dickinson

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

Francis Bacon, I think

"Though my soul may dwell in darkness, it will arise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

Note: Thanks to my friend Colleen Henry who knew me well enough to know I would really cherish this one.

"Reason has moons, but moons not hers lie mirrored on her sea confounding her astronomers, but oh, delighting me."

"May fortune favor the foolish."

Captain James T. Kirk

"Don't Panic!"

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

"He who loses control, loses."

Frank Pembleton, Homicide

"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

Henry Van Dyke