Monday, August 13, 2012

What Matters Most


 Quotes

We all love quotes because they sum up in a few well chosen words and idea or concept that makes sense.   Sometimes you might even catch yourself saying something, or hear someone else say something that makes you stop and say, “I better write that down.” 

In fact, posting my thoughts on Facebook and elsewhere causes me to say this so much that I do stop and write down those short little phrases and comments that seem to sum up my thoughts.  My list of quotes is growing, maybe if I get famous other people will quoting me.  But until then I’ll just keep reading the quotes of others.

And that’s just what I do every morning.  I always have from eight to ten different books that I read from each morning during the time between 5 a.m. and about 8:30 when I need to begin my work day.  And I always have a book of quotes in the stack.  In fact, right now I have two.

One is the Calendar of Wisdom compiled by Leo Tolstoy.  Each day of the year he has quotes from others and his own thoughts listed.  The day’s quotes usually follow a theme for the day, although he does not announce the theme.  Tolstoy considered this the most important book that he wrote, and he wrote it late in his life. 

I’m reading it through for the third year in a row.  Yes, it’s that good.  I make notes in the margin if I agree with the quote, and sometimes just cross it out if I don’t agree. Some really well known people have had their quotes crossed off by me.  It is interesting to open the book each day and see what I was thinking about the same quote a year ago.

Recently I finished a huge book of quotes called Divine Sparks compiled by Karen Speerstra.  She spent a life time collecting quotes and cataloging them by topic.  Then she selected 500 words that represented the topics and published a book with multiple quotes on each topic from over 1,800 different people.  The book is nearly 600 pages and must have close to 5,000 quotes.  It took me 500 days to read it through the book reading all the quotes for each word.  She subtitled the book, “Collected Wisdom of the Heart” and it is a good course in wisdom.  I’ll probably start reading it again beginning in January of 2013.

My other current quote book is Change Your Life – A Little Book of Big Ideas compiled by Allen Klein.  His big idea quotes are centered on thoughts that follow the letters of the alphabet though he leaves out a few letters.  Speerstra did not however, her first word with quotes was “Abundance” and the last word with quotes was “Zoroastrianism.”

What Matters Most……..why the quotes themselves, of course.  Here is a brief sampling.

“Everything depends on the use to which it is put.”  --Reinhold Niebuhr

“What is moral is what you feel good after; what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”  --Ernest Hemingway

‘The price of anything is the amount of life you pay for it.”  --Henry David Thoreau

“All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  --Leo Tolstoy

“Personally, I have never liked folks who didn't speak plainly.  Communication is meant to be understood, not figured out.”  ---Jim High

© 2012 #16  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467