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Title: Through The Microscope
Author: R. D. Cumming [
More Titles by Cumming]
Life is full of impossibilities.
After all it is not money we want so much as something to do.
Every man should have an accomplishment of some kind.
Some music is like a jumble of misplaced notes.
If you have reached forty and have done nothing, get busy.
We sometimes lose dollars by being too careful with our cents.
We should try to arrange ourselves so that we will appear as plausible as possible to posterity.
We must have something to worry about or we will become stagnant.
Music should be rendered slowly and softly so that each note may have time to tell its story before the next one comes on the stage.
When we are young our time is all present. When we are old there is no present, but our time becomes the aggregate days and years.
We sometimes get into trouble trying to keep out of it.
It is not what we would like to do, but what we can do.
Let us take our medicine philosophically.
A dollar looks larger going out than it does coming in.
What is that we see falling like grain before the reaper? It is the days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years.
Every dog wonders why the other dog was born.
We are so constituted in temperament that one may love what the other hates.
A face is like a song, it has to be learned to be thoroughly appreciated. You have to acquire a taste for it, and when it is once memorized it is never forgotten.
Most of our best words are derived from dead, heathen languages.
If you have married the wrong man, or the wrong woman, cheer up and be a philosopher over it. Philosophy is a good substitute for love if properly applied.
If you do not go about sniffing the air you will not find so many obnoxious odors.
If you have a mental wound of any kind, do not mind; time, the great healer, will cure it.
We despise the ancient heathen, yet in some cases we have risen from his ashes.
A woman dresses for appearance, not for comfort.
An ounce of domestic harmony is worth a ton of gold.
We should adjust ourselves as much as possible to circumstances.
It is better to be a dummy than to be a gossip.
Every man thinks his dog is an angel.
It is not always the one who can afford it who keeps the hired servant.
Since we can grow a new finger nail, why cannot we grow a new finger?
The mouse is destructive only from man's point of view.
When a man reaches forty he usually settles down to make the best of things.
Sometimes we are called cranks because we will not be sat upon.
The passing of time so quickly would not be so regrettable were life not so short.
A good book has no ending.
It is nothing to win a girl if you do not win her love also.
The passing of time so quickly takes the pleasure out of everything.
If you are popular, anything you say will rise into the air like a Zeppelin. If you are unpopular anything you say or do will sink into the ocean of oblivion like a Titanic.
It is a pity we have to do so much to get so little.
It sometimes pays to accept a few cents on the dollar and let it go at that.
Sometimes men become so parasitical to their occupation that, were they to lose it, they would drown.
"Help ye one another." It pays.
Our mistakes keep us perpetually on the convalescence.
Woman is equal to man--sometimes more than equal.
While the years are with you freeze on to them as tightly as ever you can.
The "Give-in-to-nothing-or-nobody-for-anything" spirit nurses a great deal of evil.
It takes forty years for a man to become a philosopher. Some never graduate.
Our generation is to be pitied. It is living in the most extravagant age the world has ever known.
When the church does not ameliorate the objectionable dispositions of its adherents, it has failed in its mission.
It is diplomacy to be on friendly terms with all men.
Politics are sometimes dangerous things.
Be cheerful under all circumstances.
The human race has mounted a treadmill which it must tread or perish.
The strenuous industries of this world are man's unconscious efforts to preserve his increasing numbers from annihilation.
Courtesy in business is the best policy.
It takes three men's wages to sustain one family in an up-to-date fashion.
Under the circumstances, it is almost necessary to be greedy and grasping.
To be perfectly healthy we should adopt the exercises followed by our ancestors in climbing among the trees.
It is not how much you can do or how quick you get through it, but the care that you take and how well you can do it.
It is not the gift but the giving.
It is quality, not quantity, that counts.
Do not measure a person's length by your personal prejudices.
The man who never had an enemy is too good for this world.
"You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink." You can send a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.
The dog hates the cat, and the cat hates the dog, but when they are friends there are no truer ones.
Just take the world as it is; take things as to be had. Your friends may not be quite so good, your foes not quite so bad.
It is the aggregate that counts.
The almighty dollar is getting smaller every day.
It is fashionable to be lazy.
Money is man's passport through the world.
The one who is most jealous is the one who is least in love.
Poetry is something that was written by someone who is dead.
Life is one thing after another--getting in between man and his money.
Some men are so small that they could easily go through the eye of a needle.
Often the man who is the most mean in buying is the most extortionate in selling.
Some husbands have to prove their love by sending their wives off for a month's holiday every six weeks.
The cat is one of the most cleanly of animals, yet she has never been known to take a bath.
"It is an ill wind," etc. The harder the times become to others, the better they become to the sheriff.
Germany wants to reap where she has not sown.
Misery likes company. It is consolation to know that everybody else is hard up during these hard times.
In our life struggle we are obliged to sacrifice many of our pet ambitions.
If a person is not naturally inclined he cannot be influenced by argument.
When the war is over it will be an easy matter to estimate the German casualties. She had about sixty-five millions.
The present seems to be a thing of the past.
An honorable defeat is more commendable than an empty triumph.
One half of the war in Europe does not know what the other half is doing.
Sometimes finance gets men into positions for which they are not qualified.
We must abandon that ancient superstition that a dollar has any financial value.
Where a cat and a canary are brought up together, the cat ultimately gets the canary.
If a man does not support his country during the war, what can he expect after the war is over?
There is not a misunderstanding but that can be adjusted amicably if it is gone about in the right spirit.
Your business is not the only important one.
It is a pity the cat would not always remain a kitten.
With the bank man it is more a matter of figures than it is of dollars.
To man, money is like a train going into a tunnel. It goes in at one end and out at the other, and leaves nothing.
Never judge a person's way by what the other people say.
There are only two sides to business: what I.O.U. and what U.O.I.
Where there is abundance there is likely to be waste and lack of economy.
A one dollar contra is often used to stave off a hundred dollar account.
"Every crow thinks that its bird is a white one," and every man thinks that his wife is the right one.
The hieroglyphic signature is often taken as a sign of perfect commercial attainment.
Some people give and take; others are all take.
Blessed is the man who has no family, for he shall inherit wealth.
Unlucky is the man who has children, for verily I say unto you, they keep him broke.
The good Samaritan who lends his friend a dollar, sometimes loses both the friend and the dollar.
The poorer a man the greater his misfortunes.
A great many children go to school to learn to read novels.
It takes as long to become a man as it does to become a philosopher.
Life is far too short judging by the time it takes to collect some of our accounts.
First, steel made millionaires, then railways, then oil, then pork; and now it is the automobile.
When two or three women are gathered together no man can tell when the end will be.
The well-fed philosopher is likely to have a well-fed philosophy; the under-fed one an emaciated variety.
Habitual melancholy is not always a mental derangement; it is very often a constitutional weakness.
Live and--let your indorser--learn.
The further you get into the world the less time you have for poetry, philosophy and sentiment.
The doctor is a man whom we don't want to do any business with.
You seldom meet an enthusiast who is not a crank also.
Individually, dimensions are determined by the proportions of the observer.
The modern attitude is a contempt for economy. Conservation is a bugbear.
Your neighbor is not a freak because he does not fall in line with your way of thinking.
When you have gained your equilibrium, you usually find that it was not worth while getting mad after all.
[The end]
R. D. Cumming's short story: Through The Microscope
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