College quotes

 from "Old Collection"

This is a packet put together by the Graduate Advisor of the Union Activities Board (UAB) at MSU. The packet cover letter is dated November 10, 1992.

Page One: Senior Class Council - May 16, 1988

Good and Getting Better

Everyday is an opportunity - an occasion to celebrate you being happy and healthy and hopeful.

Life is the most important thing we have.

We must not lose track of that.

It is governed by time - and the times of our lives are meant to be fulfilling and rewarding.

We can help that belief to become a beautiful reality, or we can stand defiantly in its way and be unhappy.

That choice is ours to make.

Our lives will either be short or long.

We cannot choose the distance.

But we can decide how to travel along the way.

Let us walk the way with our friends and our family;

Let us run to the arms of our love.

Let us blend together dedication and desire; discovering always new things about ourselves and new ways to see the world in a positive light.

If we can do that, then this dream can be fulfilled...believing in ourselves, and knowing that every day for the rest of our lives that we're better than we were...

but we're getting better still.

The old will change and become the new.

The past we wish to leave behind is left behind;

that which we choose to take with us on our journey is gently folded and placed in our spiritual suitcase and taken along beside us as precious memories.

Page Two

Life's greatest lesson is to accept the bad and good

In a question period following a lecture, one of the college students in the audience asked, "What is the most important lesson you've learned in life?"

I had no hesitancy in replying, "How to accept ambiguity and live with it."

What I meant was learning how not to be frozen into one attitude toward events that happen in the world, to myself or to others.

Human life is many things, both wonderful and terrible. It is a mixed fabric of good and evil, happiness and horror, matters we can control to some degree and matters beyond our control.

We can do much, but not all; the task is to do as much as we can, and to accept what comes after that - to acknowledge both the efforts of free will, and the ultimate decisions of fate.

Ambiguity is the very essence of human existence. Almost nobody is loved as much as he or she would like to be; nobody succeeds in every area of life, just as nearly as nobody fails in every area. We cannot change the cards we were dealt; we can only play the hand to the best. People who cannot or will not accept ambiguity in the human condition are the most miserable and disappointed of all. They are either swimming upstream or sinking, drowning, when they can float.

Most people today fail to recognize that happiness is a fairly recent aspiration of the human race. For most of history, survival was the goal - coping, making do, struggling against the caprices of natural disasters, and the blows of social and economic injustice.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still function." Few temperaments, much less minds, are able to do this. We must learn to extract the sweet and endure the bitter, often from the same potion.

It is the basic ambiguity of life that prompted Aristotle to say that no man can know whether he is happy or not until it is time for him to die. (Side note: I don't agree with this ending line-sorry, Aristotle)

Page Three

The Secret of Success

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the respect of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived...THIS IS TO HAVE SUCCEEDED!

Page Four

If I Had My Life To Live Over...

Someone asked me the other day, if I had my life to live over, would I change anything? "No," I answered. Then I began to think...

If I had my life to live over, I would have talked less and listened more. I would have invited friends over to dinner even though the carpet was stained and the sofa was faded I would have eaten popcorn in the "good" living room and worried less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace. I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.

I would have cried and laughed less while watching television - and done more of it while watching life. I would have shared more of the responsibilities carried by my wife. I would have gone to bed when I was sick instead of worrying that the Earth would go into a holding pattern if I missed work for one day. I would never buy anything just because it was practical, wouldn't show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. There would have been more, "I love you," more "I am sorry"...But mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every moment, look at it and really see it and live it - and never give it back.  ~Anonymous

Page Five

A Guide to a Happy Life

No one will ever get out of this world alive. Resolve therefore to maintain a reasonable sense of values.

Take care of yourself. Good health is everyone's major source of wealth. Without it, happiness is almost impossible.

Resolve to be cheerful and helpful. People will repay you in kind.

Avoid angry, abrasive persons. They are generally vengeful.

Avoid zealots. They are generally humorless.

Resolve to listen more and to talk less. No one ever learns anything by talking.

Be chary of giving advice. Wise men don't need it and fools won't heed it.

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometimes in life you will have been all of these.

Do not equate money with success. There are many successful moneymakers who are miserable failures as human beings. What counts most about success is how a person achieves it.

~Lloyd Shearer, 1989