For Valentine Lovers Without A Valentine Line

I created this scroll for a post a couple years ago but thought there might be a few who just can’t come up with the right line for their valentine. Here are 50 from the past that you can pick and choose from. Please …don’t confine yourself to only one …wonder awaits!

I hope you enjoy 50 Shades of Love, and Happy Valentine’s Day with love to all.

50 Shades of Love from Paul Mark Sutherland

1. Life is the flower for which love is the honey. —Victor Hugo
2. Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. —Plato
3. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. —Nicholas Sparks
4. If you judge people, you have no time to love them. —Mother Teresa
5. Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
   —Zelda Fitzgerald
6. A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you. —Elbert Hubbard
7. Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. —Robert A. Heinlein
8. You don’t love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand. —L.J. Smith
9. For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul. —Judy Garland
10. Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. —Lao Tzu
11. Where there is love there is life. —Mahatma Ghandi
12. Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality. —Emily Dickinson
13. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others… —John Lennon
14. I love you, and it’s getting worse. —Joseph Morris
15. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. —Pablo Neruda
16. Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. —Aristotle
17. If you love someone, put their name in a circle not a heart, because a heart can be broken, but a circle goes on forever. —Brian Littrell
18. If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever. —Alfred Tennyson
19. Love is a game that two can play and both win. —Eva Gabor
20. I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.
    —Victor Hugo
21. When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth. —Jess C. Scott
22. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. —Ursula K. LeGuin
23. There’s this place in me where your fingerprints still rest, your kisses still linger, and your whispers softly echo. It’s the place where a part of you will forever be a part of me. —Gretchen Kemp
24. Come sleep with me, we won’t make love, love will make us. —Julio Cortázar
25. Morning without you is a dwindled dawn. —Emily Dickinson
26. Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
    —Maya Angelou
27. The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
    —W. Somerset Maugham
28. Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. —Mitch Albom
29. Where there is great love, there are always miracles. —Willa Cather
30. Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. —David Byrne
31. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. —Margaret Atwood
32. I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses…the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you in the final hour of my life…to lie in your arms as I take my last breath. —Lisa Kleypas
33. If I know what love is, it is because of you. —Hermann Hesse
34. One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is love. —Sophocles
35. Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky. —Hafiz
36. Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing. —Mother Teresa
37. Who, being loved, is poor? —Oscar Wilde
38. Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself. —Leo Buscaglia
39. I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.
    —Paulo Coelho
40. If you have love, you don’t need to have anything else, and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter much what else you have. —James Barrie
41. Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable. —Mahatma Gandhi
42. Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive. —Louisa May Alcott
43. The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love. —Henry Miller
44. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead.
    —Bertrand Russell
45. The soul that can speak through the eyes can also kiss with a gaze.
    —Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
46. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning
47. Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. —Oscar Wilde 
48. In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities. —Janos Arany
49. I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
    —Roy Croft
50. I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you …and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine. —Laurell K. Hamilton

Extend Your Hand, Don’t Point It

ANCHORAGE — Kenyada Waters was driving through town when she noticed a man on the side of the road. He was holding up a cardboard sign that read, “Laid off 2 long. Anything helps.” Waters noticed all of the cars in front of her drove right past him.

Something in her told her to stop and hear his story.

The man introduced himself as Richard and explained his situation. He told her how he’s been a tree-trimmer for nearly 20 years but found himself down on his luck after getting laid off.

Richard said his cellphone was cut off because he ran out of money. Standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign was his last resort. He told Waters that people would drive by him and yell out, “Get a job you stupid, lazy bum!” Richard told Waters that he had submitted over 20 job applications but since his phone was turned off, he wasn’t able to hear back.

Waters says his story inspired her to help. She decided to pay for two months’ worth of cellphone service for him. “This man cried in AT&T!” Waters said.

As soon as his phone powered back on, there was a job opportunity waiting for him in his text message log.

“It might be you one day!” Waters wrote on a GoFundMe page she has set up for Richard.

“Extend your hand don’t point it!”

Enjoy!

This story originally appeared in USA Today:

A Christmas Candle

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing; It makes no noise at all, but softly gives itself away.
–Eva Logue

________________________________

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Thank you to each and every of my online friends and colleagues. You are special people in my world. May the joy and peace of Christmastime be your special companion this holiday season and throughout the coming new year.  —Paul Mark Sutherland

 

original graphic credit: unknown

Thank Yourself

A Very Personal Act Of Thanksgiving

To achieve a life of success, no matter how you define it, gratitude is imperative …we all know this. But, our gratitude must also extend to our self. It’s easy for us to forget that. We shouldn’t.

Like me, you may have heard people express regrets as they approach the winter of their years about their shortcomings and failures. Often they are disappointed that their lives didn’t quite turn out they way they had planned, had expected, or had hoped. Most of us enter adulthood full of ideas, spirit, energy, and grand intentions. It seems at the time that we are eternal, if not immortal.

We eventually discover, however, that while life can be fun and engaging, it also becomes progressively more challenging when dealing with finances, careers, families, responsibilities, losses, and so much more. Most of us do an admirable job navigating the changes and challenges. We work hard and do what we feel is the right thing. We set goals and lay out life plans, but often find it increasingly more difficult to stay on track. We find that the years pass faster than we imagined they could. We learn to grow with our years and deal with our tears. Maybe we feel that we will never be able to make the mark that we had planned.

As I write this, the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus”comes to mind. As Mr. Holland, portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss, approaches the end of his career, seemingly disappointed with his mundane accomplishments in work and life, he is presented with evidence that his work ethic and compassion over the years have made a mark much more meaningful than he thought. This opus ends with quite a crescendo.  (If per chance you haven’t seen this movie, I highly recommend that you do. It is a very moving and uplifting film.)

No matter what you have achieved in life …or haven’t, Max Ehrman, author of “Desiderata,” penned a poem called “A Prayer” that makes it a bit easier for us to accept ourselves for who we are, and to thank ourselves for our efforts in life.

Enjoy, and please do be thankful to yourself for yourself.

A  PRAYER
by Max Ehrman

Let me do my work each day;
And if the darkened hours of despair overcome me,
May I not forget the strength that comforted me
In the desolation of other times.

May I still remember the bright hours that found me
Walking over the silent hills of my childhood,
Or dreaming on the margin of the quiet river,
When a light glowed within me,
And I promised my early God to have courage
Amid the tempests of the changing years. 

Spare me from bitterness
And from the sharp passions of unguarded moments.
May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit.

Though the world knows me not,
May my thoughts and actions be such
As shall keep me friendly with myself.

Lift my eyes from the earth,
And let me not forget the uses of the stars.
Forbid that I should judge others,
Lest I condemn myself.
Let me not follow the clamor of the world,
But walk calmly in my path.

Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am;
And keep ever burning before my vagrant steps
The kindly light of hope.

And though age and infirmity overtake me,
And I come not within sight of the castle of my dreams,
Teach me still to be thankful for life,
And for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet;
And may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still.

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all. (even  if it’s not a holiday for you today)  🙂

 

 

Paris Open Doors

Paris residents warmed the Internet’s collective heart Friday night by using the hashtag #PorteOuverte, or “open door,” to offer shelter to strangers left stranded after at least six deadly attacks sent the city into chaos. A few hours later, people across the U.S. returned the favor with a hashtag of their own: #StrandedinUS.

The hashtag #StrandedinUS began trending overnight Friday into Saturday with offers from Americans willing to help Parisians having trouble making their way back home due to airline cancellations or delays. People offered up beds, couches and hot meals to French nationals in need.

Those having trouble making their way back to France were also encouraged to use the hashtag to ask for help.

 

graphic credit: unknown, information credit: NBC News

 

Special Bikes for Special Kids by a Special Man

Bicycles and tricycles for special needs children have adaptations like foot straps, torso supports and adjustable parts. They cost from $800 to $5,000, said Andrew McLindon, 53, founder of the foundation.

Over seven years, the McLindon Family Foundation has given away adaptive tricycles to children in nine states, helping them feel the independence and freedom of riding a bike.

McLindon’s love of bicycles led him to give away adaptive bikes. After success with the commercial construction company he started in 1989, he added auxiliary businesses that became Mainspring Companies, a group of construction, maintenance and real estate development enterprises.

[MORE]

Enjoy!

 

A Pizza and A Coke

Both gentlemen may have slept a bit more contented that evening,
but likely for different reasons.

I’m reminded of the poem “Don’t Find Fault”

Don’t find fault with the man who limps
    or stumbles along the road,
Unless you have worn the shoes that he wears,
    or struggled beneath his load.
There may be tacks in his shoes that hurt,
    though hidden away from view
Or burdens he bears placed on your back,
    might cause you to stumble too.

Don’t sneer at the man who’s down today,
    unless you have felt the blow
That caused his fall, or felt the same way,
    that only the fallen know.
You may be strong,
    but yet the blow that was his, if dealt to you
In the self-same way, or at the self-same time,
    might cause you to stagger, too.

Don’t be harsh with the man who sins,
    or pelt him with words or stone,
Unless you are sure-yes doubly sure,
    that you have no sins of your own
For you know, perhaps, if the tempter’s voice
    should whisper as soft to you
As it did to him, when he went astray,
    it would cause you to falter, too.

-Author Unknown

 

Enjoy!

 

Homeless Man Gives Beyond His Means

A community in British Columbia is feeling warm and fuzzy after a homeless man’s generosity inspired residents not once but twice over the past two weeks. First, the unidentified man with little to his name found a suitcase with $2,000 in it on a street in Victoria, but turned over the cash to police believing it was “the right thing to do,” authorities tell the CBC.

As the story spread, Mike Kelly of website Victoria Buzz began fundraising to help the guy out and donations flooded in, totaling $5,000—including $255 donated by kids who’d opened a lemonade stand, CTV News reports. But finding the Langford man in his 60s proved difficult. “It’s not easy tracking down a person of no fixed address and no phone, but I kept trying,” says officer Alex Bérubé. “I was touched by the story.”

After hours of searching on and off the clock, Bérubé finally found him on Monday and told him of the money that was his if he wanted it; he didn’t. “Instead of asking how to collect it, he asked me how to donate it” to a local homeless shelter, Our Place, and other food service providers for homeless people, Bérubé says.

Officers told the man to think over his decision, but when he visited a police branch thenext day, his choice was the same. In a handwritten letter, he described his intentions for the money—though he also made one small, additional request: He asked for a job. Kelly says he plans “to do everything I can to help find him a job that fits his personal situation” and is soliciting help.

Enjoy!

This story originally appeared in Newser:
http://www.newser.com/story/208928/homeless-man-turns-down-5k-in-exchange-for-this.html

More:
http://www.gofundme.com/x2y2ajk

http://www.victoriabuzz.com/homeless-man-who-turned-in-over-2000-asks-victoria-buzz-to-help-find-him-a-job/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/homeless-man-who-turned-in-2k-refuses-fundraising-cash-1.3127636

http://www.goldstreamgazette.com/news/310574571.html

 

Peace Amid Chaos

I doubt taking care of toddlers is part of police training, or is it? First responders must continually assess and make split second decisions while on the job. Some even go beyond what is required (a lot, probably). That is what officer Nick Struck did for a family and a little girl he didn’t know when he responded to a fatal automobile accident.

 

story credit: USA Today / KUSA

Teenage Compassion – What Goes Around Comes Around

What a beautiful and touching story of giving.

Enjoy!

 

story credit: WMUR