Life

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

by Robert Frost

“Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts.”
- Charles Dickens

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith

“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”
- Indira Gandhi

“Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

“You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy.”
- Anonymous

“Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.”
- William Safire

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

by Wilfred Owen

“There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.”
- Albert Guinon

“Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.”
- Demosthenes

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…

“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”
- Henry David Thoreau

“The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”
- George Eliot

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson