HOPE

Hope is important.  Maybe it's more important than that.  Maybe it's the core of the human experience.

For sure it is a behavioral keystone of our everyday social contract with each other.

It seems as though these random and pervasive hopes form the foundation for what most people classify as their belief systems.  And what better security blanket for us as we hurl through the cosmos at 67,786-mph, than the intertwined fabrics of hope and belief?

I'm not a huge supporter of most traditional belief systems and the attendant doctrines, fears, and guilt typically connected.  It just seems as though regardless of noble intent and wishful thinking, that belief systems often require the ying of negativity (consequence) to balance the yang of gratification (pleasure.)

My preference is to keep it positive.  My goal is to focus on hope.

(If you have a few minutes, visit this link to a message of "hope." Sometimes words can only take you so far.)

QUOTES

"It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." - Albus Dumbledore

"A man who uses his hands is a laborer. One who uses his hands and mind is a craftsman. He who uses his hands, and his mind, and his heart is an artist." - St. Francis

"Execution is the chariot of genius" - William Blake

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw 

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

"You don't take a photograph, you make it." - Ansel Adams

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 
But make allowance for their doubting too; 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies, 
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating, 
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; 

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; 
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; 
If you can meet with triumph and disaster 
And treat those two imposters just the same; 
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken 
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, 
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools; 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 
And lose, and start again at your beginnings 
And never breath a word about your loss; 
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
And so hold on when there is nothing in you 
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on"; 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch; 
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; 
If all men count with you, but none too much; 
If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run - 
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, 
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
-Rudyard Kipling

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!" - Margaret Meade

"Nothing in this world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of education derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." - Calvin Coolidge

"You are only as strong as your purpose, therefore let us choose reasons to act that are big bold righteous and eternal." - Barry Munro

"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." -- Sir Barnett Cocks

"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor." - Neil Gaiman, Sandman

"Evil triumphs when good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke

WRITINGS

Words are important.  I really believe that.  And, as technology pulls us further down into the social abyss of human non-communication, words and root meaning are more important than ever.

My hope for this section of gibberish is to populate it with words that mean something.  Some self-generated.  Mostly though from others with greater talent.

"I love to cook.  Baking mostly."