| AP English Thoughts of the Day |
| 8/27 | "A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child." |
| 8/28 | "To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—This is to have succeeded." —R. W. Emmerson |
| 8/29 | "Anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new, give us more to see." —William Sondhein |
| 8/30 | "If you are too careful, you have so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something." —Gertrude Stein |
| 9/3 | "The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will." |
| 9/4 | "Listen to the mustn’ts,
child, Listen to the don’ts Listen to the shouldn’ts the impossibles, the won’ts Listen to the never haves Then listen close to me— Anything can happen, child, Anything can be." —Shel Silverstein |
| 9/5 | "It is better to have loafed and lost, than not to have loafed at all." —James Thurber |
| 9/6 | "When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice." —Old Native American Saying |
| 9/9 | "Though years have crippled my body, Centuries could never subdue my soul. And although you see before you a wrinkled old man, inside I am bursting with a youthful spirit, born the day I decided to live without a single regret. Yes, my life has been a struggle, full of obstacles, but during it all, I always believed, truly believed, that with hard work, determination, and a lot of faith, I could accomplish anything." —J. A. Johnson |
| 9/10 | "One cannot be content to creep when one feels the impulse to sour." —Helen Keller |
| 9/11 | "The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work." |
| 9/12 | Photograph If you want
beautiful, pitiful, have me in a picture |
| 9/13 | Persistence "Nothing is the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; un-rewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." —Calvin Coolidge |
| 9/16 | "Do or do not, there is no try." —Yoda |
| 9/17 | "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." —Alexander Pope |
| 9/18 | "If you’re always thinking about tomorrow, you can spoil a whole lot of todays." |
| 9/19 | "Minutes and Minutes to Memories, Life sweeps away the dreams that we have planned. You are young and you hare the future, so suck it up, tough it out, and be the best you can." —John Melloncamp |
| 9/20 | "Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men/women, wisdom in minds attentive to their own." —William Cowper |
| 9/23 | "Hello (Turn your radio on)" by Shakespeare’s Sister I woke up this
morning and the streets were fill of cars, |
| 9/24 | "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." —Spock |
| 9/25 | "Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors." —Emmerson |
| 9/26 | "Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who need it." |
| 9/27 | "To conduct the orchestra, you must turn your back on the crowd." |
| 9/30 | "To be a leader, you have to make people want to follow you, and nobody wants to follow someone who doesn’t know where he’s going." —Joe Namath |
| 10/1 | "Duct tape is like the force—It has a light side and a dark side and it binds the universe together." —Science Alliance Motto. |
| 10/2 | "The things which hurt instruct." |
| 10/3 | "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when
first we practice to deceive." —Sir Walter Scott The Starfish As the old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a youth ahead of him picking up starfish and flinging them, one by one, into the sea. Finally, catching up to the youth, he asked him why he was doing this. The answer was that the stranded starfish would die if left in the morning sun. "But the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of starfish," countered the old man. "How can your effort make any difference?" The youth looked at the starfish in his hand and then threw it to the safety of the waves. "It makes a difference to this one," he said with a smile." —from The Sower’s Seeds, by Brian Cavanaugh. |
| 10/4 | "Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you’ll have of changing others." —Jacob Braude |
| 10/7 | "Failure is not a option." —Apollo 13 |
| 10/8 | "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." —Mark Twain |
| 10/9 | "Sometimes people leave you half way through the wood. Others may deceive you; you decide what’s good. You decide alone, but no one is alone." —Into the Woods by Stephen Sondhein |
| 10/10 | "If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything." |
| 10/11 | "Old man," said a fellow pilgrim
near, "You are wasting your strength with building here, Your journey will end with the ending day, You never again must pass this way, You have crossed the chasm deep and wide— Why build you this bridge at eventide?" The builder lifted his old gray head, "Good friend, in the path I have come," he said, "There followeth after me today, A youth whose feet must pass this way. This swollen stream which was naught to me, To that fair-haired youth my a pitfall be, He, too, must cross in the twilight dim, Good friend, I am building a bridge for him." |
| 10/15 | "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more productive than a life spent doing nothing." —George Bernard Shaw |
| 10/16 | "Live then, beloved children of my heart and never forget that, until the day God decided to reveal the future to man, the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these words: wait and hope." —Count of Monte Cristo |
| 10/17 | "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance or conscious stupidity." —Martin Luther King |
| 10/23 | "Prejudice is a raft onto which the ship wrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety." —Ben Hecht |
| 10/24 | "Don’t go gentle into that good night. / Rage, Rage against the dying of the light." |
| 10/25 | "Take me to a world that’s filled with happy people. Take me to a land where the poor men are the rich ones. Where there are smiling faces and the lonely ain’t alone. Take me to the peaceful place that I call home." —Blessed Union of Souls |
| 10/29 | "Heroes get remembers, legends never die." —Babe Ruth |
| 10/30 | True words are not beautiful; Beautiful words are not true. A good man does not argue; He who argues is not a good man. A wise man has no extensive knowledge; He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man. The sage does not accumulate for himself. The more he uses for others, the more he has himself. The more he gives to others, the more he possesses of his own. The Way to Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
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| 11/1 | "Fools learn nothing from wise men, but wise men learn much from fools." —Johnathan Kasper Lauatar |
| 11/4 | "The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry, and leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy." —Robert Burns in "To a Mouse" |
| 11/5 | "Patience is a quality you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead." |
| 11/6 | "It is easy to be angry when defrauded or defied, to be peeved and disappointed if your wishes are denied, but to win a worthwhile battle over selfishness and spite, you must learn to keep strict silence though you know you’re in the right." —"The Most Vital Thing in Life" |
| 11/7 | "A devoted heart may move heaven" (Anything is possible, help your brother) —Old Korean Saying |
| 11/8 | "I don’t know the secret to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." |
| 11/12 | "I’m like a duck: calm above the water, but paddling like hell underneath." —Fred Shero |
| 11/13 | "If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done around here." —My dad (the CPA) on April 14. |
| 11/14 | "Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies." —Shaw Shank Redemption |
| 11/15 | "I believe that man will not mearly endure; he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." —William Faulkner |
| 11/18 | "Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death." —Mame |
| 11/19 | "Those who dream by day are aware of many things which escape those who dream by night." —Edgar Allan Poe |
| 11/20 | "Success is a ladder that can’t be climbed with your hands in your pockets." |
| 11/21 | "There’s nothing to writing. You just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein." —Red Smith |
| 11/22 | "When you come to the end of your rope, tie a know and hang on." (I like "hang yourself" better) —FDR |
| 11/25 | "Always be a first rate version of yourself rather than a second rate version of someone else." —Judy Garland |
| 11/26 | "It’s not in the stars to hold our destinies, but in ourselves." —William Shakespeare |
| 11/27 | "Do not follow where the path my lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." |
| 12/2 | "Swallowing pride never choked anybody." |
| 12/3 | "Life is like a grindstone. Whatever it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us." —Thomas Holdcraft |
| 12/4 | "It can’t rain all the time." —from The Crow |
| 12/5 | "Excrementum accidit" —Fr. Paschal |
| 12/6 | "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason." —T. S. Eliot’s "Murder in a Cathedral." |
| 12/10 | "The race is not to the swift, but to those who keep on swimming." —Matt |
| 12/11 | "Hemingway once said, ‘the world is a beautiful place and worth dying for.’ I agree with the second part." —Morgan Freeman’s character in Seven |
| 12/12 | "I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I knew.) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who." —Rudyard Kipling |
| 12/13 | "Once you start down the Dark Path, forever will it dominate your destiny." —Yoda |
| 12/16 | "I hear; I forget. I see; I remember. I do; I understand." —Chineese Proverb |
| 12/17 | "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart." —Helen Keller |
| 12/18 | "An ill drawn swan looks like a duck. An ill drawn tiger looks like a dog. Both are an ambiguous undertaking, but if done improperly are worse than inaction." —Monkey |
| 12/19 | "Somewhere in your childhood a door cracks open for a moment and lets your future in." |
| 12/20 | "It’s amazing what the human body can do when chased by a bigger human body." —Jack Tompson |
| 1/6 | "When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did, in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car." |
| 1/7 | "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." —The Beatles |
| 1/9 | "To Grammer, even kings bow." —Moliere "I too dislike it, Reading it however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genius." —Marianne Moore |
| 1/10 | "When you hate, the only person you hurt is yourself because half the people you hate don’t know it and the other half don’t care." —Ghosts of Mississippi |
| 1/22 | "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability: it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right." —Martin Luther King Jr. |
| 1/23 | "You wear a coat of many colors, fabrics and textures. It is made of friends and family who care here and no longer here, far and not so far. They are all part of the coat that keeps you warm wherever you go." |
| 1/24 | "The greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." —Oliver Goldsmith |
| 1/27 | "And now here’s my secret; a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye." —Antoine de Saint |
| 1/28 | "Wisdom is oft times nearer when we stoop than when we soar." —William Wordsworth |
| 1/29 | "And even if we are occupied with important things, even if we attain honor or fall into misfortune—still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all united by a good and kind feeling which made is better perhaps than we are." —Karamazov Brothers Dostoevsky |
| 1/30 | "There is no such thing as a failure who keeps trying. Coasting to the bottom is the only disgrace." —Blues Travler |
| 2/3 | "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters to what lies within us." —RWE |
| 2/4 | "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a might bloodless substitute for life." —Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 2/5 | "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle." —Abe Lincoln |
| 2/6 | "Got a place to stay. Got a place to sleep. Got enough to make my day complete. I got a little sun and I got a little rain, but I’m still on my feet, so I really don’t complain." —Rhythm Collision |
| 2/7 | "Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t." —Pete Seeger |
| 2/10 | "Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shadows of deeper meaning."" —Maya Mengelou |
| 2/11 | "Some say eat or be eaten. Some say live and let live. But all are agreed as the join the stampede, you should never take more than you give" —Circle of Life |
| 2/12 | "There is one fault I must find with the 20th Century, and I’ll put it in a couple of words: Too adventure. What I’d like is some dull monotony, if anyone’s got any." —Goden Nash |
| 2/13 | "I can complain because rosebushes have thorns, or rejoice because the thornbush has a rose. It’s all up to me." |
| 2/14 | "The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is the ‘little extra.’" |
| 2/18 | "For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been." —John Greenleaf Whittier. |
| 2/19 | "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward." |
| 2/20 | "Everything is funny as long as it’s happening to someone else." —Will Rogers |
| 2/21 | "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." |
| 2/24 | "Tell him too much money has killed men and left them dead years before band and quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs has twisted good enough men sometimes into dry contorted worms." —Carl Sandburg |
| 2/25 | "Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that people who have the most live the longest." —Rev. Larry Lorenzoni |
| 2/26 | "Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will even bubble. Up if thou will ever dig." —Marcus Aurelius. |
| 2/27 | "You are your choices." —Jean Paul Sartre |
| 2/28 | "You do not have to be your mother unless she is who you want to be. You do not have to be your mother’s mother, or your mother’s mother, or your mother’s mother’s mother, or even your grandmother’s mother on your father’s side. You may inherit their chins or their hips or even their eyes, but you are not destines to become the women who came before you. You are not destined to live their lives. So if you inherit something, inherit their strength, their resilience. Because the only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. |
| 3/4 | "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half our creeds." —Alfred Lord Tennyson |
| 3/5 | Some People—Some people come into your lives and quickly go. Some people move your souls to dance. They awaken us to understanding with the passing whisper of their wisdom. Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon. They stay in our lives for awhile, leave footprints in our hearts, and we are never, ever the same." |
| 3/6 | "No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the starts of sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit." —Helen Keller |
| 3/7 | "If you treat an individual as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be." —Goethe |
| 3/10 | "Death is nore universal than life; everyone dies, but not everyone lives." —A. Sachs |
| 3/11 | "Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark." |
| 3/12 | "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth." —Maxim on Melville’s Desk |
| 3/13 | "I find sometimes it’s easy to be myself, sometimes it’s easier to be someone else." —DMB |
| 3/14 | "To be a winner, all you need to give is all you have." |
| 3/17 | "Sometimes good guys don’t wear white." —Minor Threat |
| 3/18 | "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." —Marie Curie |
| 3/19 | "The sound of the tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinion." —Adli Stevenson |
| 3/20 | "Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I wasn’t God." —Oliver Wendel Holmes |
| 3/21 | "We cannot end all our differences, but at least we can make the world safe for diversity, for in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breath the same air. We all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal." —JFK |
| 3/24 | "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Tis dearness only that gives everything its value." —Thomas Paine |
| 3/25 | "Wise men argue causes, fools decide them." —Anacharsis |
| 3/26 | "The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose." —J Martin Kane |
| 3/27 | "Nobody sees a flower, really—it’s so small we haven’t time and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." —Georgia O’Keefe |
| 4/7 | "When all is said and done, as a rule, more is said than done." —Lou Holtz |
| 4/8 | "Every man alone is sincere, at the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins." —RWE |
| 4/9 | "Jesus can turn water into wine, but he can’t turn your wining into anything." —Mark Steele |
| 4/10 | "Much madness is divinest sense. To a discerning eye, much sense the starkest madness. Tis the majority in this, as all, prevails. Assent and you are sane. Demure, you’re straitway dangerous, and handled with a chain." —Emily Dickenson |
| 4/11 | "A friend is the hope of the heart." —RWE |
| 4/14 | "One always discovers ones mystery at the price of one’s innocence." |
| 4/15 | "If you are about something, you have to protect it. If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it." —Prayer for Owen Meany |
| 4/16 | "Careful the wish you make—wishes are children. Careful the path they take—wishes come true, not free." —"Children will Listen" |
| 4/17 | "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." |
| 4/18 | "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something else along the way." —Franklin Adams |
| 4/21 | "In the war between falsehood and truth, falsehood wins the first battle and truth the last" —Rahman |
| 4/22 | "In each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out, that as long as it exists within us, we can’t be destroyed." —the Power of One |
| 4/23 | "An honest man he is, and hates the slime that stick on filthy deeds." —Othelo |
| 4/24 | "Just do it" —Nike |
| 4/25 | "Even the greatest of teachers won’t hesitate to leave you there by yourself, chained to fate." —Live |
| 4/28 | "Ars lange vita brevis" —Horace |
| 4/29 | "Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And new in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. Don't forget when you leave why you came." —Adali Stevenson at his Princeton Graduation |
| 4/30 | "Veni, vidi, vici." —Julius Caesar |
| 5/1 | "Psychoanalysis makes quite simple people feel they're complex." —S. N. Behrman |
| 5/7 | "I would rather be right than be president." —Henry Clay |