Lara Herscovitch: random thoughts

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

"The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe."

"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy."

"Bad week for rude surprises, after a number of Chicago drivers left their cars in what appeared to be free, legal parking spaces. When they returned, they found that parking meters had been installed and they'd been ticketed."

"...a judge dismissed a $54 traffic ticket issued to the owners of a chicken who crossed the road. Lawyers for the chicken's owners argued successfully that the California law against livestock impeding traffic applies only to farm animals, whereas the chicken in question was a pet." -The Week 06/10/05

"...the best life for me would be to get up in the morning and go to a cafe and have coffee and meet friends and read the newspaper. But you can't do it everyday, because if you did, your life would be effortless. And an effortless life is a meaningless life."

"Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood."

"When rival kayak suppliers Harmony and Werner Paddles recently introduced new paddles with the same name - Cascadia - the companies decided to settle the dispute in a paddle-off between top executives. Werner president Bruce Furrer won, and Harmony renamed its paddle Tortuga." -Business Week

"I'm on my way to the future, she said & I said, But you're just sitting there listening & she smiled & said, It's harder than you'd think with all the noise everyone else is making."

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

"It's much easier to trust the universe when it's going well, she said."

"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it."

"Democracy doesn't work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down economics... What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does."

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

"Flowers and pricker bushes grow out of the same dirt."

"I don't care if no one likes it, she said, unless no one likes it."

"Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give the world the best you have anyway..."

"All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware."

"True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning. When we are making vases, we should listen to the advice of those who know about turning glaze into Fe3O4 at 800C; when we are making a ship, it is the verdict of those who construct triremes that should worry us; and when we are considering ethical matters - how to be happy and courageous and just and good - we should not be intimidated by bad thinking, even if it issues from the lips of teachers of rhetoric, mighty generals and well-dressed aristocrats..."

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they needed constant attention & one day I decided I had better things to do."

"How'd it go at soccer? I said & he said we worked on fundamentals & I said like why you were even chasing around after a ball in the first place? & from the way he looked at me I figured out that was probably too fundamental."

"We may worry about death but what hurts the soul the most is to live without tasting the water of its own essence."

"Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't - you are right."

"Be wary of the person who is nice to you and rude to the waiter."