Spiff

...my daughter's grade 2 classroom had a poster on the walls on how to be a friend. It was such a revelation for me I wrote it down:

* Smile at people
* Say nice things to your friends
* Ask them to join in games
* Listen to your friends when they talk to you
* Think about how your friend feels
* Play and have fun with your friends

You can not fight human nature. You can only educate people to recognize the perils of succumbing to your own shallow, prejudiced views and understand that we are all human.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, _Wind, Sand, and Stars_ French aviator, writer

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate; to include the excluded; and to say 'I was wrong'. -- Ernst Heinrich Haeckel

I was angry with my friend I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. -- Songs of Experience, A Poison Tree

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not Man the less, but Nature more..
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron, _Childe Harold_, IV

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You've got to sing like you don't need the money,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Dance like there's nobody watching,
It's got to come from the heart if you want it to work.
-- Kathy Mattea's - 'Come From the Heart'

We may live without poetry, music and art; We may love without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends, we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks. -- Owen Meredith, Lucile

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
-- W. Somerset Maugham