Entitlement Triple Header

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while. - Candice Bergen   


I think fame and notoriety suffer from the same inflated importance in today's world.

One of the consequences of such notions of "entitlement" is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence. - Thomas Sowell


You mean society doesn't?


Entitlement and privilege corrupt. - Vice Admiral James Stockdale


Anytime one gets privilege they better have a friend at hand to keep them humble and rooted in reality, otherwise corruption seems inevitable. 

What do you lack

People do not lack strength, they lack will. - Victor Hugo

Entitlement

When a milestone is conquered, the subtle erosion called entitlement begins its consuming grind. The team regards its greatness as a trait and a right. Half hearted effort becomes habit and saps a champion. - Pat Riley

Daring to do the right

It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong. -Abraham Lincoln

More than machines

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and earning money.  -John Updike

Appearing at a classroom near you

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. - Sydney J. Harris

Perseverance

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. -Samuel Johnson
Every time I think an experience is more than I can handle, perseverance always help me take the next step. It is the one virtue along with patience that God wants to grant to us in abundance. Too often we pray for deliverance and immediacy rather than realize the opportunity for perseverance and patience that life and God is providing to us.

Appearing on a burlap banner near you.

(Think of one's self as a teakettle) Though up to it's neck in hot water, It continues to sing.  -Unknown
    I still have vivid memories of all the burlap and felt banners that used to be part of my home life in the 1970s and part of church life too. Statements like this quote were often on them. While I generally found them to be somewhat goofy and a bit nauseating, some did contain glimmers of truth. I wouldn't call this one of my favorite quotes, but I do like the imagery and the perspective it provides. Now where are my platform shoes?

Levity

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. - The Man Who was Thursday, 1908  G. K. Chesterton
       I don't know about the truth of this quote, but I certainly hope in it. There is rarely something so terrible that one cannot find the good in it, rarely something so sorrowful than one can not bring levity to the situation. I do what I can to bring levity, humor and general goofiness to much of what I do.  Life is so serious, I want to season it with humor, temper it with laughter, and find the ironic and absurd in the moments that unfold before us.

Chesterton #1

"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908 G. K. Chesterton
       Chesterton is a wealth of great quotes on faith, culture and the human condition.  I am sure I will be putting more of his quotes up with the passing of time.
Bonus quote from Orthodoxy:
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." - Orthodoxy, 1908

Sorrow & laughter

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. -Friedrich Nietzsche
     What is most obvious in this quote is Nietzsche's self-congratulatory style.  He was not lacking in pride, however he did make some bold comments in philosophy that have to be addressed.  His presentation of the completely autonomous "super-man" rings truer on the world stage than we realize. It's not just something the Nazi's embraced and enshrined, it's a poisonous mindset that can effect anyone with power.  However with this quote, he does reveal the deep connection between sorrow and laughter. We do suffer deeply, and life is anything but easy.  However, life is also something so mysteriously wonderful that it's difficult not to laugh when we know that there is One who is over life and all it's experiences.  Even more paradoxical, this One has entered into the human experience and made our suffering His own, and gives us the ability to tap into His joy even in the darkest of life's situations.

Meaningful matters

Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
 -Joshua J. Marine
       One of the things the students would frequently ask me is if being a priest is fun. I would usually answer them that I enjoy being one most of the time, but it isn't always fun.  As a priest I do many things that are not fun, but usually meaningful.  And at the end of the day I have more thankfulness in my heart for meaningful experiences than for fun ones. However, I frequently make boring experiences more fun for myself by my warped sense of humor or my goofy responses.  I am sure one day the men with nets will catch up to me and haul me into the asylum.

Harry S. Truman

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. -Harry S Truman

Growing in wisdom

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.
-Charles Caleb Colton

Bonus Quote - The men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
-President Theodore Roosevelt, "The Man In The Arena"  Speech at the Sorbonne.  Paris, France  April 23, 1910

More on optimism

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. -Harry S Truman

Living with hope

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. -Hellen Keller