Merle Shain Quotes

The people in your life are like the pillars on your porch. Sometimes they hold you up, and sometimes they lean on you. Sometimes it's enough to know they are standing by.

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always cost more.

The act is unjustifiable that either begs for a blessing, or, having succeeded gives no thanksgiving.

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you, and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless.

One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

Most women would rather have someone whisper their name at optimum moments than rocket with contractions to the moon.

Friends are people who help you be more yourself, more the person you are intended to be.

Our strength is in our dreams, and those who do not dare to dream damn themselves.

Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.

The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life-it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.

Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you’d like them to be, although often they turn out the same

Life is like fording a river, stepping from one slippery stone to another, and you must rejoice every time you don't lose your balance, and learn to laugh at all the times you do.

If there are no endings, there are no beginnings and you see no new lands, so for everything that's lost, there is usually something gained.

There are many pages in the book, many kinds of lives we each can live, many ways to be rich, and even more to be poor.

No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.

Each of us is a seed, a silent promise, and it is always Spring.

It takes a lot of mulch, love does, to create a froth.

Love is short, forgetting is long, and understanding longer still.

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.

It takes great generosity to accept generosity.

There are no perfect men of course, but some are more perfect than others, and we can use all of those we can get.

Compassion is the thing that leads you gently back to yourself.

There are some decisions in life that only you can make.

But who would rush at a benighted man, and give him two black eyes for being blind?

Men who take advantage of one woman take advantage of them all.

you have to be very careful when you give to others that you don't tell them how great you are rather than how much you value them.

You can tell a lot about what a man lacks by watching what he is cynical about, and many of us are cynical about love.

The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that no one is cheated in this world, unless it's by himself.

when you put something good into the world, something good comes back to you.

Some men are more perfect than others.

Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.

The best kind of men have a certainty in themselves that isn't done in when countered by a certainty in their women, and they are much adored.

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.