Brian Simo quotes

The thing about failure is that you never know how close you were to success.
-- Brian Simo

#Life

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Because of a friend, life is a little stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be near or far. If the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away he still is there to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to share life and experience with, to serve, to honor, to admire, to love.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.

If you would be a better teacher, teach by the spirit. That is the thing that gives strength and power, meaning and life, to our otherwise weak efforts... remember, you cannot give away that which you do not possess. Study the life of the master. You do not have to have a college degree to be an efficient teacher. But you do have to become acquainted with the life and teachings of the master to be an effective teacher in the church.

A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build their philosophy of life.