My mom always said “I don’t know why they call it Hump Day, no-one ever is”. I’ll leave you to interpret that for yourself. Here are some quickies to get you through rest the week.

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
-Albert Einstein

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Consider the postage stamp:  its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
-Josh Billings

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
-Joseph Joubert

Shut up, Joseph.

…life is pointless without them. A friend asked me to round up some quotes about friendship, so today’s selection is a little longer than most.

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
-Elbert Hubbard

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
-Arnold H. Glasow

Fake friends are like shadows: always near you at your brightest moments, but nowhere to be seen at your darkest hour.
- Paraphased from John Christian Bovee?

To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.
-Brandi Snyder

Friends are like pencils. When you have none, life is pointless.
-Unknown

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
-Elisabeth Foley

Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship.
-Dorothy Parker

A friend is one who walks in when others walk out
-Walter Winchell

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart
-Eleanor Roosevelt

We must hang together, or surely we shall hang separately.
-Benjamin Franklin

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.
-Sicilian Proverb

True friends stab you in the front.
-Oscar Wilde

Friendship is a treasured gift, and every time I talk with you I feel as if I’m getting richer and richer.
-Unknown

If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.
-Winnie the Pooh

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
-Albert Camus

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked
-Bernard Meltzer

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
-John Leonard

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
-Marlene Dietrich

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
-Oprah Winfrey

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

For many, Monday is a day that starts a cycle with some hope of completing it by Friday. But as someone once said, “Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday“. I often find taking unexpected breaks to be just as productive as plowing ahead. It’s pretty easy to spew out quotes about positive attitude and not quitting:

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
-Zig Ziglar

Success comes in cans, failure in can’ts.
-Unknown

But sometimes, another approach is completely acceptable:

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.
-W. C. Fields

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
-Ovid

Perhaps the main thing is to not dwell on it:

Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.
-Herman Hesse

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.
-Michael Cibenko

And make a decision when all the facts are in. Or is that when they’re NOT all in? I forget.

A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.
-Arthur William Radford

Sure, the brain can do 100 trillion calculations per second, and is considered by western science to be the seat of our awareness, creating human consciousness in its complex splendor. But don’t let these facts go to your head. Here are some less-impressive things you should know about your brain.

Feeling light-headed?

A typical brain weighs about 3 pounds, which is usually around 2 percent of total body weight.

No wonder we say we’re “immersed” in thought:

In spite of performing all the complex functions it perfoms, it is around 85% water.

It’s a bit of a resource hog:

In spite of its small percentage of total body weight, it uses 20% of the oxygen we breathe and about 20% of the calories we consume.

Think Fast! And then wait for the results….

Although the speed of nerve impulses varies with different functions, they move at a speed between 55 and 60mph

They say “a fool and his money soon go separate ways”. Or at least the band ELO does in their song Evil Woman. Actually, the original saying was from Dr. John Bridges’ “Defence of the Government of the Church of England, 1587″, in which he said “If they pay a penie or two pence more for the reddinesse of them..let them looke to that, a foole and his money is soone parted”. I think the pop song version works a bit better. But what do I know. Like my pop always used to say to me: “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?” A lot of quotes about wealth have spiritual underpinnings, but I sometimes suspect that this is a trick of the wealthy, to keep the rest of us happy with our lot in life.

Both Thoreau and Gandhi were pretty spiritual, but I don’t recall either of them ever riding around in limos:

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
-Henry David Thoreau

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
-Mohandas Gandhi

The less spiritual quotes are a lot easier to swallow, even if they give you a little indigestion:

This is an impressive crowd: the Have’s and Have-more’s. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.
-George W. Bush

It’s talk like that that inspired talk like this:

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
-G. K. Chesterton

And then there’s the realist. But wait! Napoleon Hill told me I could Think and Grow Rich!

All wealth is the product of labor.
-John Locke

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.
-Henry Ford

It’s interesting that the US Postal Service gets credit for the old “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” line. It’s actually a rephrasing of Herodotus. In any case, we thought that in light of the Snowpocalypse that struck America yesterday, we’d share some quotes about the weather:

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
-Oscar Wilde

If I’m on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast. If God wants to play through, let him.
-Bob Hope

A lot of people like snow.  I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
-Carl Reiner

When I was four or five, my mother taught me the little game where you pull petals from a daisy saying: “she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not” until all the petals are gone. I’ve often thanked her silently for teaching me about the unpredictability of women at such an early age. With Valentine’s Day just a couple of weeks away, I thought we’d share a few quotes you won’t see in a Valentine’s Day card….

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
-Stephen King

Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.
-Yeardley Smith

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.
-Oscar Wild

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles
-Beverly Jones

Forget love – I’d rather fall in chocolate!
-Sandra J. Dykes

Getting rolling on Monday is easier if you never stop moving. You can quote me on that. I think I just made it up. But it’s true; inertia is just as powerful a force as momentum. And goals? A mixed bag. Michaelangelo, for instance, obviously didn’t know about Snapple’s Number Three Is Good Enough strategy:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
-Michelangelo

Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.
-E. Joseph Cossman

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Whenever your problems are seeming overwhelming, it’s nice to put things into perspective. Yes, the meek (i.e.: microbes) may inherit the the Earth, but they won’t be getting much. Have a great weekend, because you only have about 260 billion of them left before the sun goes out.

Sure. But can they seat seven passengers?

When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

For some reason I suddenly feel lonely…

If the sun were just an inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away, Pluto 317 feet, the Earth, 8 feet.

So stop procrastinating….

In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

Maybe we should start kissing to seal business deals….

More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

Like many things in life, truth is hotly debated. Some people think it’s an obstacle to self-improvement:

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
-Clare Boothe Luce

Some people think it should be used selectively:

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.
-Richard J. Needham

And some see it as a black and white issue:

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.
-Austin O’Malley

But in any case, everyone has something to say about it…

If you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don’t sound good to you, it won’t sound good to anybody.
-Leroy ”Satchel” Paige

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
-Henry Louis Mencken

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
-Ambrose Bierce