Pine Nuts with McAvoy Layne: Useful quotes to brighten one’s day (continued)
Submitted by Jeff Munson on Sun, 09/17/2023 - 5:39pm
Continuing from last week, over the years I’ve contented myself in collecting poignant quotes that I thought might shed some light upon a long and winding road toward old age.
Recently I opened that file and was astonished to discover it had grown to 30 pages in length. So I thought for fun I might like to select my next eleven favorite non-Twainian quotes, and share them with you here in this fine family journal.
We pick it up here with number 11 from Quincy Jones: “No matter how much you feel, you have to have your science and craft together to express it. Otherwise you are in deep doo-doo.”
Mr. Jones still has it all together at 90 years young and going strong.
Number 12? Douglas Casey, while at Georgetown University, shared this satirical observation: “Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”
Robert Frost gives us number 13 with his astute definition of freedom, “You have freedom when you are easy in your harness.”
For number 14 we turn to Kahlil Gibran, “In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
At number 15 Mike Caro weighs in on gambling: “Every conscious act requires risk. Every conscious act requires decision. Put these two facts together and you realize that the secret to life is not to avoid gambling, but to gamble well.”
Moving right along, Erich Fromm asserts “Giving is the highest expression of your aliveness.”
Marcus Aurelius checks in with number 17, “Waste no time debating what a good man should be. Be one.”
A short list of useful quotes would not be complete without one from H.L. Mencken: “Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
We miss you, George Burns: “Happiness? A good cigar, and a good woman — or a bad woman. It depends on how much happiness you can handle.”
Number 20 brings us closer to home. Las Vegas is not renowned as a literary town. In truth, Las Vegas, literally translated from its original Spanish means, “place of general inebriation.”
Deke Castleman tells us, “The word ‘book’ around town, 90 percent of the time is a verb.”
Finally we shall culminate this short list with a manifesto from Bertrand Russell & Albert Einstein: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
Those two very smart men leave us on page 15 of 30 pages of useful quotes that I’d like to share, but the remaining 15 pages will have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, I hope these 11 might give you a lift as they did me.
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American."
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