The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to
change; the realist adjusts the sails.  -- William Arthur Ward
Twilight, please, before you pass, bathe my spirit as dew bathes grass.
Quiet the longing of a heart that yearns, as you fold the flowers and hush the ferns.
Guard me with shadows that will fortify my failing purpose, my weary eye,
So, in your stillness, I may re-light my faith's frail candle before the night.
-- Hazel Hall
One ship sails east and another sails west with the self-same winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sail and not the gale that determines the way they go.
And the winds of the sea are the ways of fate as we voyage along through life,
Tis the act of the soul that determines the goal, and not the calm or the strife.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour,
Then leaf subsides to leaf, as Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.  Nothing gold can stay.
-- Robert Frost
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said:  Two vast legs of stone
Stand in the desert, near them on the sand,
A shattered visage lies, whose frown,
Wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look upon all my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Yet...nothing beside it remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The empty and level sands stretch far away.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nature, with equal mind, sees all her sons at play;
Sees man control the wind...sees the wind sweep man away.
-- Matthew Arnold
I don't pretend to understand the Universe --
it's a great deal bigger than I am.  -- Thomas Carlyle
High on my hills of dreams - dear hills that know me!
And then how fair will seem the land below me.
How pure, at vesper-time, the far bells chiming.
God, give me hills to climb and strength for the climbing.
-- Arthur Guiterman
Give me a spark of Nature's fire,
That's all the learning I desire.
-- Robert Burns
How pleasant to sit on the beach - on the beach, on the sand, in the sun,
With ocean galore within reach, and nothing at all to be done!
-- Ogden Nash
It's all about the way things are and not the way things might have been.
You can be riding in the hurricane's eye and still have peace within.
-- Gene MacLellan
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