“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

“If you want to feel rich, just count the things you have that money can’t buy.”
Proverb

“Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive.

Inner peace does not.”

–Eckhart Tolle

Thinking a lot about recent deaths of innocent young men. What meaning will we give their lives, and their deaths?

The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night
and when the clock counts.

They say: We were young. We have died.
Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,
it is you who must say this.

We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.

— Archibald MacLeish

 

“This is the gift: to have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.”

— Abraham Maslow

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

– Gilbert K. Chesterton

 

“Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.”

Author Unknown

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Peter Drucker

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Anaïs Nin