Our quotation today is from Charlie Munger: "You simply can't count on your other handicaps to hold you back if you persist in being reliable." Today's poem is "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley.

Our quotation today is taken from "The Columbian Orator", edited by Caleb Bingham. I was first introduced to "The Columbian Orator" via the writings of Frederick Douglass. The quotation is: "Why, in the present day, a man's preparing himself for usefulness, is like carrying coals to Newcastle. Our country is full of useful men; ten, at least, to where one is wanted, and all of them ten times as ready to serve the public as the public is to be served."

The poem today is "If" by Rudyard Kipling.

Today's quotation is from Thomas Jefferson: "Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain cool and unruffled under all circumstances." Our poem today is "A Poison Tree" by William Blake.

Today's quotation is from Warren Buffett: "I call investing the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. You can stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! US Steel at 39! And nobody calls a strike on you... All day you wait for the pitch you like". Today's poem continues the baseball theme with "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer.

Today's quotation is from Plato: "Virtue owns no master: he who honors her shall have more of her, and he who slights her, less." Today's poem is by Phillis Wheatley - who was herself the subject of a poem by Jupiter Hammon, a poem I fear I might find too sad to recite - this instead is one of her own, "On Virtue".

Today's quotation is from John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Today's poem is from another John, John Donne, with "No Man is an Island" - I learned this one by heart as a boy.

Today's quotation is by Gustave Flaubert: "Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone." Our poem today is by Jupiter Hammon: "A Poem for Children with Thoughts on Death".

Today's quotation is from Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." For the second time in less than a week, today's poet is Emily Dickinson with "I'm nobody, who are you?"

Today's quotation is a little sad but perhaps a little more than a little true from Max Planck. Today's poem is "Ode" by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy. You may be more familiar with the 3 stanza version sometimes called "We are the music-makers". But there are, in fact, 9 stanzas, which I now well know. The phrase "movers and shakers" originates here.

Today's quotation is from William Durant. Today's poem is "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.