The View from My Window

My Observations

Darren Stansbury
Darren Stansbury, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Feb 7, 2007 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

  • Don't be too cynical. Be like a screen door and let the sunlight in while keeping the bugs out.
  • According to The Bible the all-perfect God created this imperfect world and the not nearly perfect Satan.
  • If you want someone to get lost, loan him money.
  • When you have no vision and no imagination, stability becomes stagnation.
  • Comfort from familiarity is a deceiver.
  • Be loving and you will be loved.
  • Being hated by hateful people is validating.
  • The flesh heals faster than the spirit.
  • A plant in a box has no room for growth.
  • I've thought of a lot of ways to make money. Unfortunately, they cost too much darn money.
  • If I were paid to be around lousy people I wouldn't need to work for a living.
  • Obnoxious people are not that way all the time. They have to sleep some of the time.
  • Graves around the world are filled with people who thought it couldn't happen to them.
  • Anyone who thinks he is sinless is committing a sin.
  • If you let everyone lead you you'll never get anywhere.
  • The person who first said that a man is not the sum of his possessions was jealous of a man who had
    everything.
  • If I was paid for each time I wasn't paid I'd be rich.
  • Being different for the sake of being different is a waste of creative talent.
  • So many people who consider themselves nonconformists are just conformists in their nonconformity. They think imitating other like-minded "nonconformists" somehow makes them nonconformists.
  • Self-pity is acceptable as long as you keep it to yourself.
  • Moving forward is progress only when you're headed in the right direction.
  • Maintaining a positive attitude is often challenging but always rewarding work. Negative attitudes prevail because they're easier to maintain. So many people are negative because they find sadness, despair and malevolence to require less work than happiness, hope and benevolence. It's easier for them to list their grievances than to count their blessings.
  • "Better off" and "better" are not synonymous.
  • For your life to change you have to change.
  • Many times error is the mother of creation.
  • Masculine confidence is an aphrodisiac to many women. What attracts many women to jerks is the swagger, cockiness, edge or cool that jerks usually display and the charge the women get from being with such men. The difference in jerks and nice guys is comparable to that of performance cars and safe, reliable economy cars. The performance cars get less mileage and need more maintenance than the economy rides. However, they provide more chills and thrills than the economy cars. Most of these women opt for the economy cars when they realize that so many of those performance cars also have bad brakes.
  • Impossibility is a state of mind. Many people have achieved impossible feats because either no one told them they were impossible or they didn't believe those who had.
  • As soon as a man thinks a woman is too good for him, she is.
  • A plant that doesn't bend in the wind is a dead one.
  • The gift matters more than its packaging.
  • If it's a good idea chances are someone else has thought of it. The same goes for bad ideas.
  • Human nature is timeless.
  • It is best when describing people within specific but diverse groups to do so in general terms without generalizing them.
  • The person who falls has two choices: stay down or get up.
  • Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is easier when you have boots.
  • Those who say that God is female might prefer that Adam and Eve had been named instead Madam and Steve.
  • When it rains positive people know the sunlight will return, if not today, then tomorrow. Negative people curse the rain and forget there ever was sunlight.
  • A purely physical relationship is like junk food. It provides much pleasure but no benefits, and can be unhealthy.
  • When the body takes in more calories than it burns the excess calories just go to waist.
  • Many intelligent people are great communicators who can eloquently express their ignorance.
  • All work and no play made Jack an ant.
  • Close-minded people can see just one color of the spectrum.
  • Women are both poetry and music in motion.
  • Genius is turning your weaknesses into strengths and your burdens into benefits.
  • The only redeeming quality some people have is being biodegradable.
  • People who don't defend themselves when attacked are people who feel they're not worth defending.
  • As you laugh at others others laugh at you.
  • When you don't get what you want consider that a blessing.
  • Calamity is one of many languages that God speaks.
  • If you can be allowed only one skill it's best to have people skills. If you're not personable, you fail personally and professionally sooner or later. It makes no difference how attractive, intelligent, eloquent, creative,
    resourceful or industrious you are. These qualities won't help you overcome a bad rapport, especially with those who can either open doors of opportunity for you or block your path.
  • Whether you're selling yourself romantically or professionally, you have to show you're worth the time or emotional investment. Many people avoid or dump damaged, tarnished, defective or inferior goods, spoiled or rotten food, and bad investments.
  • You don't have to be behind bars to be imprisoned. Many people are imprisoned by their attitudes and beliefs. Many people are imprisoned by their vices. Many people are imprisoned by their yearning for acceptance and
    conformity. Many people are imprisoned by mental or emotional problems. You are free when your mind, passion and spirit are unshackled of these chains.
  • You can't control the world and others around you. Ultimately you can control only the little world within your head.
  • We have conflict when we question God's will, when we doubt Him and forget that He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and all-perfect. Remember, He knows what He's doing. He never errs.
  • They say prison life is hell. However, if life elsewhere were heaven we wouldn't need prisons.
  • I'm the tree I've always been. I just have a few new branches.
  • The adversity of diversity is too much for some people.
  • In life we often do get the things we want--inseparable from the bad that comes with them.
  • A minister is walking in a park when he notices another man sitting on a bench with his eyes downcast. He says to the man, "Never worry. The Lord is with you at all times--both good and bad. He watches over you just
    as He watches over me." The man replies, "That's why I'm worried."
  • Money can't buy happiness. However, it can buy freedom.
  • Difficult times or situations can be remembered as good or bad depending on what comes from them. Often, what comes from them is a matter of choice.
  • Some people are too cool for their own good. They consider stupidity, ignorance, cruelty, discourtesy, disrespect, irresponsibility and negativity badges of merit.
  • The statement that no archeological evidence of Jesus Christ's existence has been found is moot when you consider that a resurrected body would likely leave no bones for archeologists to unearth.
  • Success requires you to take ownership of your actions, attitudes, thoughts and beliefs. This benefits the individual, who can then benefit the whole.
  • A life spent avoiding stress is a life spent avoiding growth and, well, life.
  • Some rules and processes are like your appendix: once useful but no longer so.
  • Some choose to win. Others choose to whine. Winners confront and overcome challenges. Whiners complain about them. When life beats them down, winners dig down and find the strength. Whiners just get buried in their sorrow.
  • Success is often tied to the quality, and not the quantity, of your efforts. It's about applying the old advise to "Work smarter, not harder."
  • The most effective writers, artists, speakers and musicians create vivid pictures with their talent.
  • Some forget that "weird" and "creative" are not synonymous.
  • You can't care too much about how you're perceived without diminishing yourself. You shrink as a person when you're always in need of approval and validation from others. If this is you, then others own your self-esteem.
    You just lease it from them. You pay for that lease with your words and actions, and they can change the terms of that lease at will.
  • Ignore your customers and they'll go away.
  • People who commit suicide lose dignity along with their lives. Nothing is heroic or respectable about being unable to steer the ship of life and bailing out when the task is more than you can handle alone. People who've committed suicide such as Van Gogh, Marilyn Monroe, Freddie Prinze, Kurt Cobain, Wendy O' Williams and others forever have tragedy as their legacies in spite of what they accomplished in their lives. They inspire few, if any, people. Suicide is also a selfish act. Whatever the suicide victim's problems were, they're over. Now, those close to the victim are saddled with the emotional and financial burden--and life insurance policies don't cover suicides--that the suicide victim has laid on them.
  • Good people do good even when others aren't looking.
  • Without spirituality all you have is reality and its pain, stress, grief, conflicts, chaos, disillusion, disappointment, depression, isolation, alienation, anxieties, uncertainties and afflictions.
  • The person who first said "Money isn't everything" probably had it all.
  • Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs at you.
  • Having to take a step back can be a positive move: Unless you have an exceptional vertical leap you may have to take some steps back, make a running start and then leap forward to clear a hurdle.
  • Get a grip. Decisions based on rage, lust, fear, greed, pain, grief, panic, frustration, desperation, blind trust or naive optimism will usually be bad ones.
  • Anyone who has worked in sales knows this: In sales the lower the sales quota is for an offer the harder it is to sell.
  • For many working people time doesn't grant itself.
  • No one gives you anything but problems.
  • Most people whose lives are full of drama crave and create that drama. They want their lives and the people in them to be troubled or complicated. They're bored without the drama.
  • Some people are extraordinarily lazy. As much as possible they avoid anything resembling work or anything resembling thinking.
  • Half of the world is fake, saying or doing whatever to impress the other half.
  • Many people believe in a blissful afterlife yet hardly any look forward to dying.
  • The mind and the spirit turn the gears of life. Your self- and world-perception and your degree of spirituality affect your life. The mental and spiritual world affect the physical world.
  • In a Biography magazine interview Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay, Jayne Mansfield's daughter, said that you die a million times in your lifetime. To that I would add that the self at each evolution inherits the legacy, good and bad, of the former selves.
  • Everything in the world--past, present and future--is interlinked. The self may evolve. Trends, fads, styles, attitudes, habits and tastes may change. Still, that chain does not break. The past, present and future comprise one day.
  • People with especially bad luck, who may feel as though they were born to suffer then die, may be some higher power's chosen ones as were the Biblical prophets and the Hebrews. The same goes for those with especially good luck. Both are called to serve that higher power.
  • Negative thinking requires as much or more mental energy as positive thinking. So, that energy is better spent on positive thinking.
  • People who've risen above bad situations have done so by being stronger than their situations, refusing defeat by their situations.
  • A Jew or Christian would tell you that God is great. You just have to get to know Him.
  • Negativity and positivity seek and draws themselves.
  • We're mistaken when we think our innermost thoughts have no bearing on our lives and the world around us. Like it or not whatever you say, think or do becomes part of your persona, your aura. Think as if the whole world
    can read your mind.
  • Comfort is the mortal enemy of spirituality.
  • Any success or failure is rooted in the mind and heart.
  • Happiness comes from the world around us. Joy comes from God.
  • If you're ready to blame others or your circumstances for your failures and weaknesses you must be prepared to credit them for your successes and strengths. You can't have it both ways.
  • As a human it is your right to be wrong.
  • If you don't believe in you don't expect anyone else to.
  • The root of all evil is not money or the desire for it. It's negative thinking, negative values. So many of us have mastered negative concepts. We learn it early in life. We must unlearn it before we can learn and embrace the
    positive thinking needed for positive change within, around and among us. All strife, crime, depression, grief, suicides, addictions, barriers, financial troubles, selfishness and other evils spring from negative thinking and values. Imagine how the world would be if everyone in it adopted positive thinking.
  • Negativity has an insatiable appetite.
  • Craziness, deviance, malice, ignorance and stupidity are without boundaries.

Published by Darren Stansbury

Darren Stansbury is a currently single and childless San Antonio native who loves writing and music. These are his only children. In addition to freelance writing he plays keyboards for the blues-rock/experi...  View profile

  • Your positivity is your own responsibility. No one can achieve it for you or take it from you.
  • Think for yourself.
  • Be the change you want around you.

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