Adam was but human –– this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent –– then he would have eaten the serpent.

––Mark Twain

Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you enough chance to love you enough.

––Dinah Shore

If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt… It is a mathematical law, and all live is mathematics.

––G.I. Gurdjieff

Whoever loves true life, will love true love.

––Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Let is not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

––James Thurber

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.

––Dorothy Parker

We’re all doing time. As soon as we get born, we find ourselves assigned to one little body, one set of desires and fears, one family, city, state, country, and planet. Who can ever understand exactly why or how it goes down as it does? The bottom line is, here we are. Whatever, wherever, whenever we are, this is what we’ve got. It’s up to us whether we do it as easy time or hard time.

––Bo Lozoff

Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.

 ––Art Linkletter

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

––Carl Rogers

Evil is any abstraction that enables you to look at someone and not see the person.

 ––Lee Thorn

More wisdom is latent in things-as-they-are than in all the words men use.

––Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(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 emailed to editor@thebee.com.)