Inspiration

"Live Your Prayers"

I knelt to pray when day was done
And prayed, "O Lord, bless everyone,
Lift from each saddened heart the pain
And let the sick be well again."

And then I woke another day
And carelessly went on my way,
The whole day long I did not try
To wipe a tear from any eye.

I did not try to share the load
Of any brother on the road.
I did not even go to see
The sick man just next door to me.

Yet once again when day was done
I prayed, "O Lord, bless everyone."
But as I prayed, into my ear
there came a voice that whispered clear,

"Pause now, my child, before you pray.
Whom have you tried to bless today?
Gods sweetest blessings always go
by hands that serve him here below."

And then I hid my face and cried,
"Forgive me, God, I have not tried,
But let me live another day
and I will live the way I pray."

- Author Unknown

"Inspiration does not teach that the human hand was flawless. It teaches that the hand of God that guided the human hand was flawless."

"Purpose: Find your aim in life before you run out of ammunition."

On thinking ahead, from the novel "Artifact" by Greg Benford, a "hard" sci-fi writer who is also a physicist:

"There was a great mathematician named Hilbert, who telegraphed Berlin saying he had proved the outstanding unsolved problem in mathematics, a thing called Riemann's conjecture.  It has to do with the roots of a well known function.

He sends this telegram to Berlin, where he's going to give a speech.  Everybody gets excited.  So Hilbert shows up and talks, and says nothing about the problem.

Somebody comes up to him after the speech and says, what about Riemann's conjecture, what's the solution?

Hilbert says he hasn't got one.  He was taking his first airplane trip to Berlin, and was pretty nervous, so he sent the telegram in case he got killed."