Thoughts to Ponder

"Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey."
---Marcel Proust

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
---Edith Wharton

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
---J. Nehru

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face us with the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.
---Henri Nouwen

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?
---Sydney J. Harris

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak Whispers the o're-fraught heart, and bids it break.
---{The Tragedy of Macbeth, IV, iii) - Shakespeare

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
---Ayn Rand