poems for valentines

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different. ~Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, 2000


Byword: a proverbial expression; proverb; often-used word or phrase.


Aphorist: someone who formulates aphorisms.


Man must search for what is right, and let happiness come on its own. ~Johann Pestalozzi


Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go. ~Blaise Pascal


Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions. ~Edgar Cayce


We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree. ~Roy L. Smith


A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them. ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978


You know it's time to diet when you push away from the table and the table moves. ~Quoted in The Cockle Bur


Fishing is the sport of drowning worms. ~Author Unknown


The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. ~James Matthew Barrie


The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same. ~Charles M. Allen


Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority. ~W.J. Cameron


My songs are just little letters to me. ~Ani Difranco


To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment. ~Jane Austen


Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapter XV "Hester and Pearl"


It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. ~George Santayana


Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own. ~Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, 1925


Love worketh no ill to his neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. ~Romans 13:10