It’s hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn’t own water skis or a snorkel.

 –Bill Vaughn

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

 –Joseph Campbell

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

 –Brian Aldiss

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

 –Fred Astaire

Insanity is hereditary: You can get it from your children.

–Sam Levinson

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

 –Logan Pearsall Smith

Educate a man and you educate an individual – educate a woman and you educate a family.

 –Agnes Cripps

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

 –Zen saying

In the beginning there was nothing and God said “Let there be light,” and there was still nothing but everybody could see it.

–Dave Thomas

I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better.

–Glenda Jackson

My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.

–Liberace

Some people’s idea of [free speech] is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.

 –Winston Churchill

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

 –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.

 –M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

 – Abraham Lincoln

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

 –John Wooden

One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment, gaining my looks.

 –Nora Ephron

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

 –H.L. Mencken

There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunneling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pale a little as the days ran on.

 –James Thurber

(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.)