The Fruit Untasted

 Life is more a basket of kumquats than a bowl of cherries -- the task you kumquat finish, the promise you kumquat keep, the "I'm sorry" you kumquat say. 

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Define Marriage

Disclaimer:  The following applies to marriages generally and not to any particular marriage I might be involved in.  😉

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Marriage:  the unforeseen consequence of a wedding.

Marriage:  a state of bliss in which if one partner dies unexpectedly, the other is the prime suspect.

Marriage: the process by which, after two become one, they decide which one.

Marriage:  a partnership formed with no clear objective and sustained by the absence of any clear alternative.

Four Thoughts

 It is a shame to keep a deep dark secret from the one person who might most help you to bear its burden.

It is sad when a relationship survives all the reasons it could never work only to fail because you neglected the reasons it should have worked.

There are words said in the heat of argument that cannot be unsaid.  You can only hope that love will unhear.

The ultimate test of love is a test of forgiveness, and no one so tested will ever ask again, "What is love?"  

Ah, Perspective!

A summer vacation seems wonderful in prospect,  but then, in the actual experience, it so often diminishes to the point of becoming a series of irritations, until, inevitably, it retreats into memory and becomes wonderful again. 

And therein lies the question -- if you look forward to your vacation with great anticipation and remember it with wistful pleasure, does it really matter if you didn't actually enjoy it?

As I See It

A working republic is a tangible entity, consisting of the government, the governed and a neutral third party mediator called the Constitution.  

A working democracy is an intangible ideal, defined by an enlightened leadership and supported by an essentially non-political electorate amenable to leadership.

The most basic progressive belief is that if we can get the rich to pay their fair share, we won't have to pay ours.

The most basic conservative belief is that if you weren't born to opportunity, you had your chance.

A political party is like any other conspiracy, the people it targets believing they are part of the conspiracy.

If we of the middle class nearly always support the rich over the poor, it is because we rightly believe that the poor want what we have while wrongly believing that the rich don't.

A free-enterprise system is a meritocracy where a few enterprising individuals eventually control most of the wealth, and where, if left unbridled, the most enterprising single individual eventually controls all the wealth.

On Likability

Two things are needed to be likable -- you must possess the likability gene, and you must not know you possess it. 

You wonder if people with a winning personality worry that they are liked just for their personality.

If there's one question that's always answered eventually, it is why you didn't like someone at first.

Personally I would never want to be liked just for my money -- although I would not refuse money for that reason.

Although dictionaries do not usually define "to understand" as 
"to like," that is usually what people mean when they ask to be understood. 

Imperfection Anyone?

What if you eliminated all the faults in your character only to discover that the faults were the only character you had? 

There's nothing like a self-improvement program to discover what your friends used to like about you.

If we learn from our mistakes, shouldn't a job resume be a list of our mistakes?

One of life's more jolting discoveries is that you are not your best friend's best friend.

It is less what love sees in you than what love chooses to overlook.

The hardest part of marrying "for better or worse" is when it's better for one and worse for the other.

Mozart died at 35.  Alexander the Great died at 32.  Makes you wonder what great things you might have achieved if you had only died young.