For where love is wanting, the beauty of all virtue is mere tinsel, is empty sound, is not worth a straw, nay more is offensive and disgusting.
~ John Calvin

Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.
~ Claudian

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
~ Anton Chekhov

Oh, what a heaven is love! Oh, what a hell!
~ Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, in The Honest Whore

Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and is certainly something that can’t be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hub Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in  A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper, 1972), page 45

Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon

When love is not madness, it is not love.
~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~ Dorothy Parker

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Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno

It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler

Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy

Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May

But then no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
~ Irving Stone, in Lust for Life

Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?

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Aunt Debbie: “Daniel, do you like your Kindergarten teacher?”

Daniel: “No. I don’t like her, (pause) but I love her.”

[An hour later.]

Me: “Daniel, what did you mean when you said that you don’t like your teacher but you love her.”

Daniel: [turning red] “You know. I like her, but I don’t “like” like her.”

Me: “I don’t know what you mean.”

Daniel: “I like her, but I don’t want to date her or anything.”

* * *

I’m glad to hear that Daniel is going to wait until after he gets out of Kindergarten to start dating his teachers.

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One man has never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.
~ Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy

Every woman should marry, and no man.
~ Benjamin Disraeli, in Lothair

Vitium uxoris aut tollendum aut ferendum est. Qui tollit vitium, uxorem commodiorem praestat; qui fert, sese meliorem facit. [A wife's faults must either be corrected or put up with. Who corrects the faults, makes his wife more pleasant; who puts up with them, makes himself a better man.]
~ Lucius Afranius, in Satirae Menippeae, De Officio mariti

The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.
~ Emma Goldman

Once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched.
~ Ernest Hemingway, in The Three-Day Blow

A good marriage is when you’re married not to someone you can live with, but to someone you really cannot live without.
~ Dr. Howard Hendricks

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parenting

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It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
~ Erma Bombeck

Parents are not interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.
~ Bill Cosby

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
~ Phyllis Diller

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
~ King Edward VII

The reason you want your kids to pay attention in school is you haven’t the faintest idea how to do their homework.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz

Nurses nurse
and teachers teach
and tailors mend
and preachers preach
and barbers trim
and chauffeurs haul
and parents get to do it all.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz

An advantage of having one child is you always know who did it.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next.
~ Franklin P. Jones

A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Our children are being raised by appliances.
~ Bill Moyers

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
~ Robert Orben

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
~ Robert Orben

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
~ Anna Quindlen

Have children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.
~ Rita Rudner

Parents, if you love your children, do all that lies in your power to train them up to a habit of prayer. Show them how to begin. Tell them what to say. Encourage them to persevere. Remind them if they become careless and slack about it. Let it not be your fault, at any rate, if they never call on the name of the Lord.
~ John Ryle, in The Duties of Parents

A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family.
~ Thomas Scott

An evil upbringing in the home is worse than the wars of God and Magog.
~ Talmud, Berakot, 7

He who teaches his son is as if he had taught his son, his son’s son, and so on to the end of all generations.
~ Talmud, Kiddushin, 30

Do not threaten a child.  Either punish or forgive him.
~ Talmud, Semahot, 2, 6

Parents: A peculiar group who first try to get their children to walk and talk, and then try to get them to sit down and shut up.
~ Wagster’s Dictionary of Humor and Wit

Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.
~ John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

I’ve got two wonderful children — and two out of five isn’t too bad.
~ Henry Youngman

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The making of friends who are real friends is the best token we have of a man’s success in life.
~ Edward Hale

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
~ Ali ibn Abi Talib, A Hundred Sayings

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
~ Henry Adams

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
~ Aristotle

A true friend is one soul divided into two people.
~ Aristotle

I get by with a little help from my friends.
~ The Beatles

A friend is the only person you will let into the house when you are Turning Out Drawers.
~ Pam Brown

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
~ Octavia Butler

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years of trying to get other people interested in you.
~ Dale Carnegie

Sometimes our hearts get tangled
And our souls a little off-kilter
Friends and family can set us right
And help guide us back to the light.
~Sera Christann

Woman –a foe of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil.
~ Saint John Chrysostom

You might as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life: for the immortal gods have given us nothing better or more delightful.
~ Cicero, in On Friendship

Fire and water are not of more universal use than friendship.
~ Cicero, in On Friendship

In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.
~ J. Churton Collins

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
~ Dinah Craik

I felt it shelter to speak to you.
~ Emily Dickinson

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
~ Marlene Dietrich

No one knows with any certainty whether any act of friendship or love is real or simply a calculated ploy to get something from someone else.
~ David Dorsey, in The Force

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
~ Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Friendship

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
~ Elisabeth Foley

It is a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.
~ Benjamin Franklin

True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
~ D.T. Gentry

Your friend is your needs answered. He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving. And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
~ Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
~ Dave Tyson Gentry

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
~ Arnold Glasow

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers, and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
~ Goethe

A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.
~ Grace Pulpit

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Your friend is that man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Character is so largely affected by associations that we cannot afford to be indifferent as to who and what our friends are. They write their names in our albums, but they do more, they help make us what we are. Be therefore careful in selecting them; and when wisely selected, never sacrifice them.
~ M. Hulburd

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and more symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
~ Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World

My father always used to say that, when you die, if you’ve got five real friends, then you’ve had a great life.
~ Lee Iacocca

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
~ John 15:13

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
~ Emily Kimbrough

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
~ C.S. Lewis

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
~ Abraham Lincoln

The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
~ Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Joseph Gillespie, 13 July 1849

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
~ George MacDonald

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
~ Katherine Mansfield

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
~ Katherine Mansfield

I’ll lean on you and you lean on me and we’ll be okay.
~ Dave Matthews Band

Friendship is a cadence of divine melody melting through the heart.
~ Charles Mildway

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh!” he whispered. “Yes, Piglet?” “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
~ A.A. Milne

We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.”
~ Michel Eyquen de Montaigne, in Essays, Bk. 3, Ch. 13

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
~ Toni Morrison, Beloved

Hold a true friend with both of your hands.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
~ Anaïs Nin, diary entry, March 1937

We have been friends together
In sunshine and in shade.
~ Caroline Sheridan Norton

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
~ Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude

And when somebody knows you well, well there’s no comfort like that. And when somebody needs you, well there’s no drug like that.
~ Heather Nova

Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship.
~ Dorothy Parker

You can always tell a real friend; when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.
~ Laurence J. Peter

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.
~ Plautus

Friends can be said to “fall in like” with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.
~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
~ Marcel Proust

A friend loves at all times, and kinsfolk are born to share adversity.
~ Proverbs 17:17

A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
~ Proverbs 18:24

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.
~ Proverbs 27:6

To attract good fortune spend a new penny on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon.
~ Chinese proverb

Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.
~ Czech proverb

The road to a friend’s house is never long.
~ Danish proverb

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
~ Japanese Proverb

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.
~ Sicilian Proverb

Life without a friend is death without a witness.
~ Spanish Proverb

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.
~ Swedish Proverb

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.
~ Donna Roberts

Friends never betray you, only people you thought were your friends.
~ T.Mike Runger

A friendship that can be ended didn’t ever start.
~ Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Oeuvres poétiques

To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.
~ Sallust

One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
~ George Santayana

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
~ Albert Schweitzer

A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter;
he who finds one finds a treasure.
A faithful friend is beyond price,
no sum can balance his worth.
~ Sirach 6:14-15

In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend.
~ Solon

A friend is a present you give yourself.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
~ Sun Tzu

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
~ Henry David Thoreau

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
~ Henry David Thoreau

True wealth can not be found in your bank account. It can only be found in those you call friend. Those with whom you share your deepest feelings. And those who accept you for who you really are.
~ Mary Vandergrift

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
~ Virginia Woolf

Are we not like two volumes of one book?
~ Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.
~ William Arthur Ward

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.
~ Flavia Weedn

A friend can tell you things you don’t want to tell yourself.
~ Frances Ward Weller

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.
~ Edith Wharton

A true friend stabs you in the front.
~ Oscar Wilde

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
~ Oscar Wilde

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
~ Oprah Winfrey

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.
~ Winnie the Pooh

A good friend is a connection to life – a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.
~ Lois Wyse

A real friend is someone who would feel loss if you jumped on a train, or in front of one.
~ Author Unknown

A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked.
~ Author Unknown

Friends are family you choose for yourself.
~ Author Unknown

Friends are kisses blown to us by angels.
~ Author Unknown

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer.
~ Author Unknown

If you’re alone, I’ll be your shadow. If you want to cry, I’ll be your shoulder. If you want a hug, I’ll be your pillow. If you need to be happy, I’ll be your smile. But anytime you need a friend, I’ll just be me.
~ Author Unknown

The best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you’ve had.
~ Author Unknown

There are big ships and small ships. But the best ship of all is friendship.
~ Author Unknown

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The below story is excerpted from The Wit and Wisdom of Joe Brumbelow: Favorite Illustrations, Personal Stories, Humor, History, Folklore, and Lessons Learned from Over 50 Years in the Ministry. I believe the practical wisdom found in the pages of this book to be very beneficial for those engaged in ministry and heartily recommend it.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Then, members of Doverside started a Bible club. They began the club in the pastor’s back yard that was at the back of the church property. Later they moved into the Fellowship Hall. Most of the children from the apartments were from broken homes. some had real behavioral problems. Discipline often was necessary. Sometimes a child or two had to be sent home.

One day, as the kids waited in line to go inside, Joe saw a little boy go over to a little girl and kick here in the leg so hard she fell to the ground in tears. Joe grabbed the little boy and gave him a talking to. He spoke so sternly, the boy began to cry. Joe, seeing his tears, then gave him a big hug. He told him that he loved him, but he could not allow that kind of behavior.

Another little fellow saw the first boy kick the girl. He saw the preacher grab him, shake him, and rebuke him. Then he saw the preacher give the boy a big hug and tell him that he loved him. “So help me,” Brother Joe said, “that little fellow went over and kicked the same girl. That second boy was saying, ‘I want to be loved, too. I want somebody to hug me, too.’ The preacher then went throught he same routine with the second boy. Joe said, “It was difficult on the little girl, but I got the message. Everyone out there needs someone to love them.”

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

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Put your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car for an hour.

When you open the trunk, which one is happiest to see you?

Desire increases when fulfillment is postponed.
~ Pierre Corneille