If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

–Carl Jung

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

–Boris Pasternak

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you’ve got it you might be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

–Garrison Keillor

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

   –Franz Kafka

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

– Willa Cather

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

–Abraham Lincoln

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

–Mark Twain

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

 –Anonymous

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

 –Albert Einstein

Try? There is no try. There is only do or do not do.

 –Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

Marge, don’t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.

–Homer Simpson

In America any boy may become President, and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes.

 –Adlai Stevenson

A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

 –John Updike, “Confessions of a Wild Bore” 1965

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

–Henry David Thoreau

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or e-mailed to editor@thebee.com.)