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To Russia With Love

Amy and I are going to be in St. Petersburg-Russia soon. We were  in Moscow a few years ago and loved it!  Even though the people were hard to engage, there was something about the city that drew us. St. Petersburg is different from Moscow as it is the most European of Russian cities. The Hermitage Museum (which I am stoked to see) holds Rembrandt’s painting “The Prodigal Son.”  I have a print of that work on my office wall and I am beyond excited to have the opportunity to gaze at it for a while! From the descriptions I have heard and the images I have seen, St Pete looks and sounds beautiful. It would seem we also get a double blessing as we will be experiencing the White Nights” while we are there. The White Nights are a perpetual dusk…it never gets dark…

As we are getting prepped and set to take off, I thought it would be good to absorb to the words of some famous Russian writers, Dostoyevsky & Tolstoy…

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“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“To love someone means to see him as God intended him.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Beauty will save the world”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness…”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”
― Leo Tolstoy

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy

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LIFE: SNQuotes 6/23/12

Ah life. How should you live it? Why did you receive it? Where is it all going? There are as many questions about life as there are life-forms in the universe! This week I pulled from some fun and diverse sources to find out what others have had to say about life and living.

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Every man dies. Not every man really lives.  ~William Wallace

Don’t go through life, grow through life.  ~Eric Butterworth

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
~William James

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.  ~Charles Darwin

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.  ~James Allen

A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.  ~Carl Sandburg

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.  ~Mignon McLaughlin

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.  ~Richard Bach

I love those who yearn for the impossible.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is not length of life, but depth of life.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.  ~Charlotte Bronte

Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.  ~Albert Schweitzer

Life is a long lesson in humility.  ~James M. Barrie

Life is half spent before we know what it is.  ~George Herbert

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Life must be lived as play.   ~Plato

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.  ~Rebecca West

Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you’re not alive.  ~Mel Brooks

My life is my message.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Our entire life – consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
~Jean Anouilh

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
~Soren Kierkegaard

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.   ~Woody Allen

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.  ~William James

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.  ~Carl Jung

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.  ~Buddha

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.
~Erma Bombeck

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.  ~Albert Camus

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Finding Happiness SNQuotes 6/18/12

What is happiness? Where do you find it? How is it measured? Humanity has been asking these questions and seeking the answer since the very beginning. Here are some varying thoughts from men and women who come from some very different places and spaces. Read, ruminate, consider and smile.

Monty

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Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.  ~Audrey Hepburn

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.  ~C. S. Lewis

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.  ~C. S. Lewis

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.  ~Thomas Jefferson

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.  ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.  ~Helen Keller

Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing.  ~Napoleon Hill

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
~Dale Carnegie

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.  ~Dale Carnegie

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present.  ~Jim Rohn

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.  ~Marcus Aurelius

The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.  ~Carl Jung

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.  ~Soren Kierkegaard

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.  ~Billy Graham

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.  ~Leo Buscaglia

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Sunday Night Quotes 5/6/2012-Star Wars

So my son comes home the other day and noted that I should be watching a Stars Wars movie. “Why?” I asked him. He responded, “because today is May 4th.” I still wasn’t catching on, and so I said, “what does May 4th have to do with my needing to watch a Star Wars Movie?” The response I received after that was one of those “are you kidding me-you really don’t know?” looks and tones as he slowly intoned the answer…”You know dad, may the fourth-be-with-you…” “Ahhhh, I replied.”

In light of May-the-fourth-be-with-you, tonight’s quotes all come from various Star Wars characters dispensing their wisdom, idioms and metaphors. There really are some great thoughts here. If you have a favorite Star Wars quote leave it a s a comment!

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Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.  ~Yoda

A Jedi gains power through understanding and a Sith gains understanding through power.  ~Palpatine

Who’s the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?  ~Obi-Wan Kenobi

The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.  ~Yoda

The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.  ~Obi-Wan Kenobi

We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life.  ~C-3PO

Aaaaaaargh!  ~Chewbacca

I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you!  ~Luke Skywalker

All who gain power are afraid to lose it, even the Jedi.  ~Palpatine

“Luke: What’s in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you.”

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.  ~Yoda

Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.  ~Yoda

Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, farm boy.  ~Han Solo

Your focus determines your reality.  ~Qui-Gon Jinn

Mom, you said that the biggest problem in the universe is no one helps each other.  ~Anakin Skywalker

May the Force be with you.