“She wasn’t doing a thing I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” – J. D.Salinger

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst:

November 3

'My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.'

- Abraham Lincoln

‘You will never really win until you develop the holding power life requires of all winners.'

- Arnold Kunst

“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” – Harriet Tubman

2 November

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

You’re off to do the culture-vulture thing in Europe? Sounds wonderful! Let me, if I may, give you a bit of advice: I wish for you to notice all those benches in all those museums you'll be visiting; sit down in front of all those Vinus di Milos you're going to see, and let them work their magic on you as they are meant to. Let their symmetries, their colors, their textures seep into your pores. You could, of course, catch up on your emails in that museum but, to be honest, that sounds about as odious as skate-boarding in a church. Give up managing. Instead, surrender to the genius of the artist, and let yourself be pliable to his emotional thrust.

Do that and you will come back immeasureably enriched. In fact if you do it right you will never be the same again. You will know the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘A human mind once stretched will never again return to its original dimensions.’

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” – T. S. Eliot

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst:

November 2

During one of the 1858 senatorial debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln reached for a metaphor to describe the 'humbuggery' of popular sovereignty as a sort of anti-expansionist device. Thanks to Douglas's own inconsistent interpretations, 'had it not got down as thin as a homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation?'

'Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood'

- Nancy Hirsch

“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” – Warren Buffett

1 November

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

When you set yourself an admirable long-term goal, it’s not supposed to evaporate like snow in spring under the withering blast of a casual “You’re going to do what?!?”

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.” – St Francis de Sales

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst:

November 1

'Lincoln's strength is of a peculiar kind; it is not aggressive so much as it is passive, and among passive things it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress, as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end; and probably by no other kind of strength could our national ship have been drawn safely thus far during the tossings and tempests which beset her way. Surrounded by all sorts of conflicting claims, by traitors, by half-hearted, timid conservatives, he has listened to all, weighed the words of all, waited, observed, yielded now here and now there, but in the main kept one inflexible, honest purpose, and drawn the national ship through.' 

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

'We live in a world of deception and hypocrisy, of greed and materialism, of brutality and cowardice. And yet we are, each of us, called to be the balm to one another's wounds.'

- Arnold Kunst