The World Laughs With You

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For this brave old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 - 1919), American poet, "Solitude"

Proper Place

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.  You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder.  He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it.  You do not need to send him to the back door.  He will go without being told.  In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.  His education makes it necessary.

-- Carter Godwin Woodson (19 December 1875 - 3 April 1950), African American professor, historian, author, and journalist, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)

Ground For Taking

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

-- Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (1910 - 1989), British humanist philosopher, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays (1990) "The Concept of Freedom"

Eustress

The term eustress means "beneficial stress" -- either psychological, physical (e.g., exercise), or biochemical/radiological (hormesis).

The word was introduced by endocrinologist Hans Selye (1907-1982) in 1976; he combined the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and the English word stress, to give the literal meaning "good stress".  The Oxford English Dictionary traces early use of the word (in psychological usage) to 1968.

Eustress is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings.  Hans Selye created the term as a subgroup of stress to differentiate the wide variety of stressors and manifestations of stress.

-- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What Matters Most

What matters most is that we learn from living.

-- Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013), British writer, born Doris May Tayler, 2007 Nobel laureate in Literature, as quoted in Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003) by Jill Murphy Long, p. 147

Tuning Our Opinions

[W]e consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor's pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound.

-- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), known as Mark Twain, American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer, "The Privilege of the Grave" (1905), published in 2010, the author having requested it not be published until 100 years after his death

Unjustly

[V]iolence done ... is always sure to be injustice done; for violence does even justice unjustly.

-- Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881), Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher, Past and Present (1843) Book I, Chap. III