Quotes and proverbs are not quite the same thing, true. So technically this should be called “My Favorite Quotes.” But hey, feeling lazy today.

I love quotes, have collected them all my life in a small notebook (I’m on the third one now) and find them to be pithy summations of so many situations that fit their boiled-down wisdom. They’re like the opposite of soundbites; quotes can unpack into massive discussions, but they remain the word pictures worth a thousand words. So here are a few of my favorites:

Utopia is just a massacre away. –unattributed

I first saw this in the decorated calligraphy of a friend who sold his art as a side hustle. It’s not so much a literary quote directly as a distillation of Thomas More’s Utopia written 500 years ago now, and still relevant. In our strange times, I have seen more people on both sides of any sides that can be had these days dehumanizing others to the point of “just get rid of them and the rest of us will be fine.” This was particularly a combination of amusing and horrifying in a pro-life discussion among Christian friends. Kill the Democrats, and we can have a pro-life regime.

Uhhhhhh….. does anyone else see something wrong with that reasoning? Just asking: what would Jesus do?

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –Maya Angelou

And how. I find myself examining discussions to avoid wanting to be right, and instead wanting to be sure people have information, and emotional support. We recently finished working on the COVID CONSPIRACIES book and the final chapter is all about how to keep friends while losing emotional baggage from their high-energy demands to fight over ideas. Unfounded information should be challenged, yes, but if this is someone you want to keep, consider the long game. And I’m not buying the increasing calls from people I don’t know to abandon my family for the sake of any cause, including the unmeasured calls for equal rights. It’s not equal rights if I have to stop talking to my mom, ‘kay? Let us work this out with our home teams without having to bite their heads off. We love them. And we never forget how we made each other feel, long after we forget the passionately reasoned Magnum Opus posted on Facebook for none to read past the first paragraph. Think carefully about what we make each other feel, because we will be wearing it when the pendulum swings again.

It is easy to get a thing, difficult to keep it. –Israeli Proverb

I’m not actually thinking about that pesky election here. I’m thinking about pendulum swings. What goes up must come down. A beloved storyteller I know named Elizabeth Ellis tells a story called Maybe It Is, Maybe It Isn’t in which everything that seemed like misfortune turned fortuitous, and vice versa. Such is life. The pendulum keeps swinging. Perhaps it is more important to be the kind of person Angelou describes above than the kind who puts all her eggs in a basket that will tip when the pendulum swings again. Perhaps being kind builds stability? And this quote is related to both Angelou’s and my last one:

A body makes its own luck. — Ma, Little House on the Prairie

This proverb is in many forms, and has had many people take it up (if you like quotes, Google “luck” and Hunter Thompson and Mark Twain). But that’s the first source where I saw it, and even at seven or eight years old, it stuck with me. At first, I think it stuck because I didn’t understand it. Then it became clear, watching the behavior of people in forming and breaking relationships. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Luck is being ready for your moment, and really getting one. And luck is other people, in most cases. So we go back to how we treat each other having consequences. Most of the quotes I love tend to center on that, oddly enough. Maybe because I’m not very people-savvy and need a lot of help from books.

So those are my favorites, and I hope they help inform your life as they have mine