Mom was fond of quoting famous writers and other influential figures. She liked to apply quotes from these authors to guide me and my siblings. Some of her favourite passages and sayings include:
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting, too
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream and not make dreams your master;
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn out tools;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue
Or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch
If neither foes nor living friends can hurt you
If all men count with you, but none too much
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And, which is more, you'll be a Man, my son.”
(If, by Rudyard Kipling)
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along
And flung My eager craft through footless hills of air
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or ever eagle flew
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”
(Piolot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr, 412 Squadron, RCAF, killed December 11, 1941)
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
(Shakespeare – Hamlet)
“To thine own self be true. The it follows as the night the day
That thou canst be false to no man.”
(Shakespeare)
“There is nature in a nut.”
(she was told frequently by her grandmother as a child)
“You can lock from a thief but not from a liar.”
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
(Shakespeare)
“There is only one perfect child, and every mother has it.”
“When poverty comes in through the door, love goes out the window.”
“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers o'er the fraught heart and bids it break.”
(Shakespeare - Hamlet)
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.”
(Alfred Lord Tennyson)
“Everyone can master grief but he that has it.”
(Shakespeare)
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.”
(John Milton)
“In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.”
“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
(H.L. Mencken)
