Compassionate Understanding...

People need loving the most 

when they deserve it the least. 

~John Harrigan 

REAL Talent vs. Modesty...or does it?

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
 ~ Louisa May Alcott

Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy.  "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion.  She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends.  Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens."

At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed:   "I will do something by and by.  Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!

*Excerpt taken from her complete biograghy here:  http://www.louisamayalcott.org/louisamaytext.html

Improve the World!

How wonderful it is 

that nobody need wait a single moment 

before starting 

to improve the world. 

~Anne Frank

The Best of All Things...

Water is the best of all things.

PINDAR (C. 522-C. 438 B.C.), Olympian Odes

Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.

ISAAC ASIMOV, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988

Happiness and Success...

Success is getting what you want.

Happiness is liking what you get.

~H. Jackson Brown, 
A Father's Book of Wisdom