“My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.”
“One major way to avoid shifting blames unto other people is to accept and agree that the efforts that turn the loads of your self- improvement have to turn on your own pivot.”
“The same is true when it comes to getting healthy. You look in the mirror and believe that, with God’s help, you’ll get healthy even though the person staring back at you is exhausted, stressed, out of shape, or overweight.”
“This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.”
“One day, George Mbekela paid a visit to my mother. “Your son is a clever young fellow,” he said. “He should go to school.” My mother remained silent. No one in my family had ever attended school and my mother was unprepared for Mbekela’s suggestion. But she did relay it to my father, who despite—or perhaps because of—his own lack of education immediately decided that his youngest son should go to school.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
“The major mistake people pursue in decision making is to surround themselves with negatively minded people. People who are going nowhere will never take you anywhere; people who are going everywhere can take you somewhere.”
“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”
“To wake up every morning is miracle. To make a good use of every day is an appreciation of miracle. To waste the entire hours of each day is ungratefulness towards a miracle already given and received!”
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
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