Quotable Friday!

Or, "Great Quote! (Whoever said it.)"

Attributing quotes correctly is a tricky thing, especially when proliferated via the Internet. Just take a look at snopes.com, there are whole articles that circulate the Internet that were never written by the person they are attributed to, and often that person is angry that such pieces (often complete "glurge") are attributed to him or her.

For example, here are my two faves from my Weight Watchers days:

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
~ Attributed to Goethe, most likely because William Hutchinson Murray quoted him as saying such, based an embellished translation of Faust.
Like many, I though this was a Goethe quote.

"Success is getting up one more time than you fall down."
~ Attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, but derived from a Japanese proverb
Although on my Good Earth tea bag on Tuesday morning, it's written "Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up" and described as a Chinese proverb. Which is really weird, because I had always thought this was an Eleanor Roosevelt quote. She has a great many interesting things attributed to her, but this was not one!

I like this one from the home page of "A Woman's Right to Lose" blog:

"Although no one can go back and make a brand new start,
anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."
~ Several people (mostly WW folks) cite Roberta Brenick, although I've seen university web sites (mostly continuing education pages! :-) attribute Carl Bard with this one. So maybe it's not too late to become a librarian....

P.S. Yep, I walked at lunch yesterday and felt much better. I made some less optimal choices at dinner, but then Thing 1 and I rocked out to a cardio kickboxing workout and Thing 2 laid at my feet wailing because she wasn't the center of attention...kinda hard to do those kickboxing kicks with a 40-pound preschooler adhered to your ankles...Eventually she got it into the spirit of things and she and her brother ran laps around the living room and punched a balloon on each pass. "Let's make our living room into an exercise gym!" cried Thing 1 as he charged around the table. Every so often he'd drop and do a pretty decent push-up. I was duly impressed. I've got to get them some hand weights that are less than 5 pounds, though, they're going to hurt someone. "Children! Mommy's hand weights are NOT a shotput." I think next time, I'll just put on some music and let them take turns being the instructor, that way they won't feel like I'm paying more attention to the buff Aussie woman on TV.