Smile :)

Better by far you should forget and smile than you should remember and be sad.
-- Christina Rossetti

:)

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Excuses

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
- Erica Jong
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
- Joseph Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

I thought: hey, one could always use a reminder. Enjoy your life, it's the only one you have. Besides, if you can read this, you're probably better off than most of the world. You might think that what you have is no big deal, but try to imagine getting all of this when you have nothing... not a thing. And look for reasons not to worry, before you decide to do so - not the other way.

Feel the joy! Jump around! Be happy, be in the world. No excuses.

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Darwin for beginners

I'm taking an Anthropology class this semester and found passages in the book that caught my attention:

1.

The point is, scientific curiosity is not a native human talent. It has to be shaped and directed by social situations; institutional arrangements and vested interests, which give certain inquiries their characteristic verve and momentum.

2.

In his great book "The Road to Xanadu" John Livingston Lowes discusses the origins of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. He shows how the facts and images Coleridge obtained from ceaseless reading eventually returned to be incorporated in one of the gratest poems of the English language. Lowes points out that this material would have been useless, unless it had been forgotten first. It had to be plunged into the transforming depths of Coleridge's unconscious imagination before it could be retrieved and reordered.

Two things to make you think...

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neversayers

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Benjamin Franklin

List of what to never say. I'm trying to learn. And why does it always have to be the hard way?
For that, I have no answer. Still, here's a list.
For all of these and more that I can't remember (shamefully), I'm sorry. I'm sorry...
(You live, you learn, right? - Alanis Morissette song)

• (I'm sorry, but) it's not my fault


• Sure, no problem - when someone asks for something. Correction: use "my/with pleasure", "i'd love to", express concrete wish to help, not like you're doing a favor


• I made a mistake, it will never happen again (see, because it has that "never" there?)


• never


• always

(last 2: or, as I wrote a while back: always remember never to say never)

TBC

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It had to be said

Start living now. Stop saving the good china for that special occasion. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.
- Mary Manin Morrissey

Since the year's fresh, it's time to realize that living happens now and here and stop waiting for something to come.
Life's all the time, isn't it?

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