Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Old-School Quote of the Day

"If my phone's not ringing at the moment, I'll leave them with one last piece of advice. It's not just about show business, but bout life business. Yes, it's in Yiddish, but I promise them, and I promise you, my reader, that it's the last Yiddish proverb I'll throw at you. I'm a comic, for Chrissakes, not a rabbi. But this is a good one, and it's taken me eighty-six years to figure out it's truth. Everybody ready?

"Mensch tracht, Gott Lacht.

"Man plans, G-d laughs.

"In other words, life is an accident. Plan ahead as much as you want, plot out your career moves as though it's an arithmetic problem. Fate will usually have something else in mind. It might be great, it might be terrible, but all you can do is hang on."
--Henny Youngman, Take my Life, Please!: Chapter 1 - What I Tell the Young Comics at the Friars Club, or Just Because You're Eighty-Six Doesn't Mean You're An Alter Kocker, 1991

These words of the late comedy great are so true.

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