Memory is an interesting thing. It’s really just a re-imagining of something that doesn’t exist, i.e.: the past. It’s also interesting that it seems to start failing us at the point in life when we might actually have time to enjoy it – when we’re old.

It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.
- Mark Twain

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

- Mark Twain

(I’ve always wondered if Mark Twain remembered saying this both ways)

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
-Steven Wright

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
-Austin O’Malley

The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Memory is what tells a man that his wife’s birthday was yesterday.
-Mario Rocco

It’s funny how much time people spend convincing themselves perfection is unattainable. This seems especially true of artists, for instance:

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
-Eugene Delacroix

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.
-Salvador Dalí

I think they just borrowed this idea from philosophical types to justify drinking so much and hanging out all day with naked women:

This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.
-Saint Augustine

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
-George Orwell

In the end, I think Churchill says it best:

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.
-Winston Churchill

You may have noticed that “work” is a four letter word. Well, “play” is too. People of our era have been indoctrinated with the “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow” philosophy. But maybe the reality is that we just need to find a little balance between work and play…

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.
-Lane Kirkland

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
-Oscar Wilde

Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.
-Francesca Reigler

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
-Donald Kendall

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
-Bertrand Russell

A bum asked me “Give me $10 till payday.” I asked “When’s payday?” He said “I don’t know, you’re the one who is working!”
-Henny Youngman

As we mentioned last week, we’re still working out our weekend schedule, but one fact we’re confident about this Friday is that we’ll see you Monday, with some inspiring quotes.

Pretty impressive that they can pull this off while walking…

If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

And what have YOU done today?

Napoleon had conquered Italy by the time he was twenty-six.

Feeling lightheaded?

Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead.

Another happy customer?

40 percent of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

A friend of mine paid a lot of money for a special seminar recently and found just a few days beforehand that the promised speaker would not be in attendance. It’s a shame that promises often play a larger role in commerce than performance….

Promises are like babies. Easy to make, hard to deliver.
-Unknown

The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The promise given was a necessity of the past:  the word broken is a necessity of the present.
-Niccolo Machiavelli

Given the number of injustices in the world, it’s too bad there are so many courts of law….

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.
-Norm Crosby

Justice is incidental to law and order.
-J. Edgar Hoover

Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices.
-Edgar Argo

Good lawyers know the law; great lawyers know the judge.
-Unknown

Did Tacitus and Lao-tzu have time machines, or do things really never change?

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
-Tacitus, Annals

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
-Lao-tzu

My grandmother always said “Laughter is the Best Medicine”. I found this disappointing, because I knew she had copped the line from the name of a Readers’ Digest feature, but I loved her anyway.

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
-Lily Tomlin

Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.
-Benny Hill

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.
-Jack Handey

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain

It’s funny that if someone says “here’s a list of funny quotes”, they usually aren’t. We’ll keep trying to remedy this. Have a favorite funny quote to share?

This morning I was thinking that rather than looking at it as the end of the weekend, I’d look at today as an exciting new beginning. Then I rounded up these quotes, and now I’m convinced it’s all a conspiracy to make me feel like it’s okay that the weekend’s over so that I’ll stop sloughing off. Or that life is a circle, so the hamster wheel analogy is more apt than we think…

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
-Seneca

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
-T.S. Eliot

From the end spring new beginnings.
-Pliny the Elder

Anna here seems more willing to give us the straight dope:

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
- Anna Quindlen

And although hardly Monday motivators, these struck me as some of the wisest words I’ve read in ages. I think I’ll use them on the boss today, so this whole exercise worked out after all:

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set
-Lyn Yutang

We haven’t decided on weekend hours yet, so here are a few quotes for the weekend. And I’d just like to say that Anonymous must have talked a heck of a lot to get quoted so often…

Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.
-Anonymous

There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends.
-Arnot Sheppard

Weekends don’t pay as well as weekdays but at least there’s football.
-S.A. Sachs

Don’t give me that quiztistical look, these things are true.

This just doesn’t look right:

Did you know that 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321?

Thank God they mostly work alone:

It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain the average human of blood.

If you’d ever hush your mouth, you might learn that…

The word “listen” contains the same letters as the word “silent”.

This could actually make for some interesting gambling, until the the first (ahem) Raid:

If cockroaches were six feet long but ran at proportionally the same speed, their top speed would be about 100MPH