I really don’t prefer to write about myself but I’m told that folks that read blogs want to know a little bit about the bloggers themselves. So here we go.
I’m really not sure what you might want to know about me. I think perhaps I’ll do one of those “Thirty Things About Me” lists that I’ve seen on other blogs. They looked like a lot of fun.
I do like quote. I tend to collect them like other folks collect stamps. I like reading what people who have lived in ages other than mine had to say about the world around them and their place in it. I find it interesting that very often, what was true a hundred years ago, or a thousand, is true this very minute. I think we forget that these days. We really do tend to think we’re too clever by half.
Speaking of quotes, I really like this one from President Roosevelt. It’s too long to be a national motto, but it wouldn’t disappoint me one bit if every schoolchild had to memorize it and recite it once a week. It seems a small difference between the messages of “You are great just the way you are!” and “You are good today, but you can be great tomorrow!” but, really, the distance between the two is considerable, expecially to a child.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, speech entitled “Citizenship in a Republic”, given at the Sorbonne, Paris on April 23, 1910
More to come…
