THOUGHTS AT MID-YEAR

How quickly a half year has flown. The calendar pages now turn faster for me every month. This is a medical condition known as “too many birthdays.”

So far, 2025 has brought political, economic, market, and international disruptions.

I hope these thoughts will help us keep perspective.

Wisdom & Philosophy

• The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• There are two kinds of tragedies. The first is not getting what you want. The second is getting everything you want.

• There are only three things we 'have to' do in this world: we have to be born, we have to die, and we have to live until we die. Everything else is a choice! — Bill Crawford

• Self-respect leads to self-discipline; when you have both, that’s real power. — Clint Eastwood

• You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the travel brochures and roadmaps in the world. — William Hazlitt

• Let us be kinder than we have to be by loving others even more than they deserve to be loved. — Elliot Engel

• The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. — William Wordsworth

• People say someone has not found himself. But self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

• If you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm. — Sam Levinson

• Grief is love with nowhere to go.

• The first Degree of Folly is to conceit oneself wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel. — Ben Franklin

• When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus. — Turkish Proverb

• Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcefully. — Attributed to Mark Twain

Critical Thinking & Perspective

• The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on trying to put things in it. — Terry Pratchett

• When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. — Thomas Sowell

• The ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.

• Be careful—someone may appear smart but may simply be rich.

• “Expert” Predictions influence our thinking, even when we don’t realize it. — Jason Zweig

• Giving power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. — P.J. O’Rourke

• The government cannot give to anybody what it does not first take from someone else.

• He uses statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. — Andrew Lang

Money, Investing & Success

• Spending beyond a pretty low level of materialism is mostly just a reflection of trying to get people’s attention. — Morgan Housel

• It’s not the high cost of living: it’s the cost of living high. — Jasper Hoots

• Savings is like the oxygen of independence. The return on that money is so large that you can’t put a price on it. — Morgan Housel

• Great investors like Buffett, and Munger don’t try to step in with the crowd. The approval of others means nothing to them. Nor should it to you. — Jason Zweig

• Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. — Charles Evans Hughes

• The generation that lived through the Great Depression never saw money the same way again.

• The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. — Marcus Persson

• Minted a multimillionaire at birth, he grew richer daily, believing success came as effortlessly as money. — Bill Morris

• The secret to investing is tolerating feeling stupid.

• The ultimate danger zone is reached when investors agree that things can only get better forever. — Howard Marks

• Don’t think you aren’t going to feel the cold if you don’t own a thermometer. — Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Learning & Growth

• You will be the same person in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read. — Charlie “Tremendous” Jones

• The scarcest resource in our world today is ‘attention.’ — Rev. Lisa Hickman

Life & Leadership

• The better part of one's life consists of his friendships. — Abraham Lincoln

• There’s great value in being able to step back and laugh at yourself, at life, and at attitudes. Laughter helps you put everything into perspective. — Jim Henson

• Weak leaders fear dissent as a threat to their power. They silence critics to shield their egos. — Adam Grant

• Strong leaders welcome dissent as an opportunity for growth. They silence their egos to learn from their critics. — Adam Grant

• If your leaders aren't teaching you something you didn't know or expanding your world view, you are being used. — Rev. Joe Clifford

• If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader. Sell ice cream. — Steve Jobs

Humor & Wit

• When do you put a cow in an elevator? When you want to raise the stakes. — Alexa

• If you want to frighten the young generation, put them in a room with a rotary phone, an analog watch, and a TV with no remote. Then leave directions in cursive.

• What do you call an elephant that can do many things at once? A multi-tusker. — Alexa

• Bring her over! I’ll be in the kitchen, with my head in the oven. — Mel Brooks’ mother on learning of his engagement to Italian Anne Bancroft

• Even if you win the rat race, you may still be a rat. — Lily Tomlin

• I’m reading a book about antigravity: I can’t put it down. — Alexa

• I can: Build weapons of mass destruction, change the course of rivers, do anything better than anybody else (P.S. I can paint a little). — Job Application Leonardo da Vinci, Age 13