My grandmother would ask me, whenever someone complained. “Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister Much-to-Do complained about?” I would nod. “Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards and their blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all, for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that [work] that person was grumbling about. So, watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. And if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” – Maya Angelou.
“To say the right thing at the right time, keep still most of the time.” John W. Roper Those who get in trouble most often are those cannot seem to keep still, remain silent. Life teaches many lessons. Among the best lessons of life is one my father taught me at an early age was, “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing.” The contributions we make to life via our mouth are many and varied. Most of the time, I reckon, they are not contributions at all, but things that diminish the richness of life.
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