Bill Cosby: Life, Marriage, and Parenting

A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.

A word to the wise ain't necessary, it is the stupid ones who need all the advice.

A word to the wise ain't necessary, it's the stupid ones who need the advice.

Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

Any man today who returns from work, sinks into a chair, and calls for his pipe is a man with an appetite for danger.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother.

My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest."

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

Gray hair is God's graffiti.

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.

I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who've had luck with it and those who haven't.

I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.

Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

Parents are not interested in justice, they're interested in peace and quiet.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.

That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle the Vatican has overlooked.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

The heart of marriage is memories; and if the two of you happen to have the same ones and can savor your reruns, then your marriage is a gift from the gods.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.

There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.

There is no labor a person does that is undignified; if they do it right.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

When you become senile, you won't know it.

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think - in a deeper voice.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who've never had any.

~ Bill Cosby

Wisdom learned from Aldon

What I Believe: The Power of Love
"I believe in God, who made the earth and everything in it. In fact, He made the universe and everything in it. I believe His power is limitless. I believe His power is based on love.
I believe that God's people, at about the time of Jesus, had given up the idea of power being based on love. He was sent as the embodiment of love to get God's people straightened out. The event of the crucifixion and Jesus' acceptance of it was made to demonstrate to the people just how powerful love can be.
There are some things that I don't believe, and one of these is of a church that is designed to control people's minds in other ways than the acts of love. I think it's a pity that there are people who need to be led by people like [that]."
~ A.P.A., April 7, 1992

"If it doesn't work, read the instructions.If it still doesn't work, follow the instructions."
~ A.P.A.

Stop, think, ask, wait

quoted from:
Tell Me About It Is boyfriend embarrassed about her?
By Carolyn Hax
Posted on Tue, Dec. 25, 2007, www.philly.com

Anytime you're faced with mystifying behavior - basically, anytime you find yourself wishing you could read someone's mind - use this formula:
stop, think, ask, wait.

"Think" means you entertain all possible conclusions, instead of just jumping to one;
"ask" means you don't accuse;
"wait" means you back off far enough to leave people room for an honest response.
. . .

Since you could "maybe" yourself into complete paralysis, it's OK to finish up the thought process by reminding yourself there could still be other reasonable explanations that haven't occurred to you.

At this point, you're wondering: Isn't it easier just to ask? Yes, of course. But people fudge their answers more when they feel cornered, less when they feel safe - and since the whole point of asking is to hear the truth, you want him to know it's safe to be honest with you. And the most reliable way to accomplish that is to approach him with your mind genuinely open to whatever he has to say.

And so you conjure all these possible explanations beforehand as a way to prop open your mind. Then, you drop your defenses and ask: What's going on?

Well-behaved women

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."

~ bumper sticker

Start every day off with a smile ...

"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with."

~ W.C. Fields

The Optional Agony of Defeat

quote from
The Woman Who Fell to Earth: To Fail Is Divine
by Martha Beck
http://www.oprah.com/spiritself/omag/
ss_omag_200712_mbeck.jhtml

My dog-groomer friend Laura breeds and shows prizewinning poodles. One afternoon she arrived at the off-leash dog park looking thoroughly dejected.

"What's wrong?" I asked her as our pets gamboled about.

"Ewok," said Laura, nodding mournfully toward her well-coiffed dog. "He didn't even place at the show yesterday. Didn't…even…place! And he just hates to lose!" Her voice was so bitter I winced. "He should have been best in show," she said. "Look at
him—he's perfect!"

I looked at Ewok. He looked fine—but perfect? Who knew? To me, saying a poodle with long legs is better than one with short legs seems absurd. A poodle's a poodle, for heaven's sake.

I think Ewok would've agreed. He certainly didn't seem to be the one who hated losing. He'd discovered a broken Frisbee, and appeared to be experiencing the sort of rapture Saint Teresa felt when visited by God. Laura's desolation stemmed not from what actually happened at the dog show but from her ideas about success and failure. Lacking such concepts, Ewok was simply enjoying life. Going to dog shows and winning, going to dog shows and losing, going to the park and scavenging—from Ewok's perspective it was all good. Meanwhile, Laura's thoughts about losing had tainted all these experiences.

Thankfully, she'd managed to avoid a pitfall even worse than failure: success. "Success is as dangerous as failure," said Lao-tzu, and any life coach knows this is true. I can't count the number of times people have told me, "I hate the job I'm doing, but I'm good at it. To do what I want, I'd have to start at zero and I might fail."

Dwelling on failure can make us miserable, but dwelling on success can turn us into galley slaves, bound to our wretched benches solely by the thought, I hate this, but at least I'm good at it. This is especially ironic because researchers report that satisfaction thrives on challenge. Think about it: A computer game you can always win is boring; one you can win sometimes, and with considerable effort, is fun.

Racehorse winning secret revealed

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/
fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7150251.stm
Published: 2007/12/19 00:22:40 GMT

Racehorse winning secret revealed

The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found. Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.

Edinburgh scientists compared the stud fees, winnings and earnings of more than 4,000 racehorses since 1922. The research was carried out by evolutionary biologists Alastair Wilson and Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh. ...

"There are good genes out there to be bought but they don't necessarily come with the highest price tag," Dr Alastair Wilson told the BBC News website. "It seems much more likely that people who can afford to pay high stud fees can also afford to manage and train their horses well."

The offspring of expensive stallions did tend to win more over their lifetime, he said, but genes played only a small role. By far the biggest factor was the horse's environment - the way they were trained, the choice of races entered and which jockeys were employed, Dr Wilson added. ...

Full details of the research are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

I Never Said ...

"I never said most of the things I said."

~ Yogi Berra

A Poor Man's Wealth

"Ability is a poor man's wealth."

~ John Wooden

For a time like this

"For a time like this, there's Jesus.
When there is no hope, there's Jesus."

~ author unknown

When to submit and when to outwit

from It's My Turn: Life Lessons From the Wife of Billy Graham
Ruth Bell Graham, p. 59-60

Adapting

"Where two people agree on everything,
one of them is unnecessary."

A group of ladies from the "Tab," where Bill was student minister, gave me a shower shortly before we were married. Each of them wrote a bit of advice on a piece of paper and gave it to me. The above quote was the pick of the lot.

How often that saying came to mind and how necessary I felt!

I have met wives who did not dare to disagree with their husbands. I have met wives who were not permitted to disagree with their husbands. In each case, the husband suffered. Either he became insufferably conceited, made unwise judgments, tended to run roughshod over other people, or was just generally off-balance. However, it is a good thing to know how to disagree and when.

Here are a few suggestions out of my own experience:
First, define the issue (and make sure it is worth disagreeing over);
next, watch your tone of voice and be courteous (don't interrupt, and avoid rude, unkind, or unnecessarily personal remarks);
third, stick to the subject;
fourth, stick to facts; and
fifth, concede graciously.

As for when to have a disagreement, this takes both sensitivity and ingenuity on the part of the wife as well as the husband.

For one thing, it is not wise to disagree with a man when he is tired, hungry, worried, ill, preoccupied, or pressured. (That doesn't leave many opportunities.)

Nor does it pay to argue with your husband unless you are looking your very best. The woman who argues with her hair in rollers has ten strikes against her to begin with.

And avoid arguing when you are boiling mad over some issue. Sleep on it first, if possible, then try to discuss it calmly and objectively. Likely as not, by then you won't be able to remember what you were upset about in the first place.

A Christian wife's responsibility balances delicately between knowing when to submit and when to outwit. Adapting to our husbands never implies the annihilation of our creativity, rather the blossoming of it.

Good Ideas

The only good ideas are the ones I can take credit for.

~ R. Stevens

At Their Best

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."

~ Jean Giraudoux

The Beginning of Healing

"Revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing."

~ Rick Warren

Impossible Seinfeld

Jerry, we loved you; now you've bumbled it
By Karen Heller
Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted on Sat, Dec. 1, 2007

Seinfeld made more money navel-gazing than possibly anyone in history.
Where he was once funny, he now sounds impossible.
"As a single person, I was always exploring the world," he confessed in one interview. "Now I've lost some interest in the world. I'm more interested in my wife and kids."

In Australia this week he said, "To me, the funny thing about being single, I had married friends and I wouldn't visit them . . . because I thought their life was so pathetically depressing. Now that I'm married and I have single friends, I feel I don't really like to be with them now 'cause I find their lives trivial and meaningless. And I think in both cases I was correct."

Oh, go back to your hive, Mister.