The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all. - Leo Rosten

A young khokhem told his grandmother that he was going to become a doctor of philosophy. The bubbe smiled proudly: “Wonderful. But what kind of disease is ‘philosophy’?

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

What a farshtinkener business!” has the edge on “What a stinking business” in my opinion, because the sh is more eloquent than the s in the communication of obloquious nuances. It is also more chic to enlist a foreign word when driven to coarse utterance.