“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy-even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.” -Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)

“Why not go out on a limb?  That’s where the fruit is.”
-credited to both Mark Twain and Will Rogers

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”  -William Morris

“The trick is to enjoy life.  Don’t wish away your days waiting for better ones ahead”.  -Marjorie Pay Hinckley

“Meet me where the sky touches the sea, wait for me where the world begins.”  –Sid Malone

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”  –Neale Donald Walsch

“Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own.”  – Matthew 6:34, The Bible

I could share the ones I love from Henry David Thoreau every day for a year, I think.  I tried to trim this list to two.  You see how well I did!  But look at these wonderful, wise words:

“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book.  Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.  Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. 

“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

And the age old poem, the one so many of us memorized in school, and still one of my all-time favorites. 

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.

And your favorites?  Do tell.