Marion Collins

Remembered Saying of My Dad #4

Dads notbook.jpg

Section 2 of Marion’s Notebook Entries: Remembered sayings and lessons are transcribed from the handwritten log of Marion Thomas Collins, Sr., my Dad.  He recorded these instructions for living a good life over a fifty-year period.

Wok, Opportunities, Success, Leadership and Wealth
Chapter 2 - Section 2
Marion’s Notebook Entries

  • You will learn as much from failure as you can from success.

  • Credit cards can be a friend or your worst enemy. Pay no interest,

  • if possible. Try to use them only if you can pay when due.

  • Winners do what losers don’t want to do—work.

  • If you want the best things in life, remember the words—try, do, I will and persistence.

  • Each person has been given time to spend. All we have to do is use it well.

  • You can get by on charm for about 15 minutes. After that, you better know something.

  • When the deadline comes, it will be too late. So do it now.

  • Motivation is what gets you started; habit is what keeps you going.

  • There will come a time when you believe everything is finished—that will be the beginning.

  • Opportunities are often things you haven’t noticed the first time around.

  • The reward for work done well is the opportunity to do more.

  • Success without honor is an unseasoned dish. It will satisfy your hunger, but it just will not
    taste good.

  • Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night.

  • Persistence is the key to success.

  • Be the task great or small; do it well or not at all.

  • As long as you do your best every job can be a learning experience.

  • The most important lesson from winning is that you can.

  • If a desire to succeed is so intense, no force on earth can stop it.

  • Privilege has responsibility—make sure you use it well.

  • The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

  • Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising your level of expectations.

  • When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses only results.

  • Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.

  • Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then you will find the way to accomplish it.

  • Great success is built by turning negatives into positives.

  • There are two kinds of people—the ones that need to be told and the ones that figure it out for themselves.

  • A leader knows what is best to do—a manager merely knows how best to do it.

  • If the window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.

  • Find a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

  • It is easy to sit up and take notice in life. What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

  • To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more worthwhile?

  • If you can’t excel with talent, do it with more effort.

  • Opportunities are often things not noticed the first time you looked.

  • Not a single rich person is getting rich by exploiting his or her working labor force.

  • A leader’s role is to raise people’s aspirations for what they can

    become and to release their energy so they will try to get there.

  • The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.

  • All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

  • Opportunities are like the sunrise; if you wait too long, you will miss them.

  • Saving is like planting a garden. If you do not plant the seed, you will not get any food.

  • If you enjoy your work and your life, you are rich. If you are not happy with either, how can money help?

  • A window of opportunity won’t open itself. It takes a little help from you.

  • No matter how much money you make, you will always be poor if you spend more than you make. It is not what you earn, it is what you save.

  • Love what you do and feel that it matters.

  • Success is getting what you want; happiness is liking what you get.

  • A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

  • Being defeated is often a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.

# # # 

For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. Audio versions of The Claret Murders and  Diversion are available from iTunes, Audibles and Amazon. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com
Published by I-65 North, Inc.

Remembered Saying of My Dad #3

Section 1 of Marion’s Notebook Entries: Remembered sayings and lessons are transcribed from the handwritten log of Marion Thomas Collins, Sr., my Dad.  He recorded these instructions for living a good life over a fifty-year period.

Wit and Wisdom: Part 3 of 3 Parts 

bookcover.jpg
  • It is always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.

  • Plans are only good intentions unless they are carried out.

  • Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

  • Never tell people how to do things.  Tell them what to do and they will probably use their ingenuity to accomplish it.

  • The trail is the thing, travel it too fast and you miss all you are traveling for.

  • There are three things that if a man does not know, he can not live long in this world!  What is too much for him; what is too little for him; and what is just right for him.

  • Knowledge is not simply another commodity.  It is never used up.  It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

  • An optimist is foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come and it usually is!

  • Be one who keeps his work, his temper and his friends.

  • Be careful in giving advice.  Wise men don’t need it and fools won’t heed it.

  • The pessimist is a good teacher.  Watch what he says and does, then you will know what you should never say or do.

  • There is too much said for the sake of argument and too little said for the sake of the argument.

  • Everyone makes mistakes, but the bad ones are the ones you do not learn from.

  • Giving, loving, caring making life better for others are some of the treasures of life.

  • When you are right, no one remembers.  When you are wrong, no one forgets.

  • There is no such thing as the perfect man or woman, but you can be the best you can.

  • Time passes too fast except during an embarrassing moment.

  • One of life’s early lessons is sadly all to true; success occurs in private and failure in full view.

  • A clear conscience is what hurts when all your parts feel good.

  • Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

  • A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

  • The longer you carry a problem, the heavier it gets.

  • Decisions are too important to leave to chance.

  • No one can get anyone out of a ditch by throwing dirt on them.

  • Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

  • The bigger a person’s head gets, the easier it is to fill his or her shoes.

  • Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.

  • If you find yourself in a hole, do not dig it any deeper.

  • The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.

  • That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.

# # # 

For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. Audio versions of The Claret Murders and  Diversion are available from iTunes, Audibles and Amazon. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com
Published by I-65 North, Inc.

 

Remembered Sayings of My Dad #2

Section 1 of Marion’s Notebook Entries: Remembered sayings and lessons are transcribed from the handwritten log of Marion Thomas Collins, Sr., my Dad.  He recorded these instructions for living a good life over a fifty-year period.

Wit and Wisdom: Part 2 of 3 Parts

bookcover.jpg
  • Tradition lives because young people come along who catch the romance and add new glories to it.

  • To receive a present handsomely and in the right spirit, even when you have none to give in return, is to give a gift.

  • While an original is always hard to find, he is easy to recognize.

  • You cannot buy enthusiasm; you cannot buy initiative; you cannot buy the devotion of hearts, minds and souls.   You have to earn those things.

  • If you are lucky enough to find a way of life, you have to find the courage to live it.

  • Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said could not be done.

  • Be patient with everyone, but most of all, be patient with yourself.

  • If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you have done it already.

  • Try it, you may like it, is an old saying, but it has some truth in it—Try it, you may like it!

  • Young people do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore, they attempt the impossible and achieve it generation after generation.

  • Some things are bad; some things are good.  If you want more good things, maybe you should try harder. Good things are out there for those that really want them.

  • One half the trouble of this life can be traced to saying “yes” too quickly and not saying “no” soon enough.

  • Repair people cost plenty. When you do have to call a repair man watch how he does it. Doing your own repair work around your home is like having another source of income 

  • What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor or if everyone was the same.

  • An optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds; a pessimist fears the same may be true.

  • Incompetent people invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

(To be continued)

# # # 

For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. Audio versions of The Claret Murders and  Diversion are available from iTunes, Audibles and Amazon. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com
Published by I-65 North, Inc.

Remembered Sayings of my Dad

Section 1 of Marion’s Notebook Entries: Remembered sayings and lessons are transcribed from the handwritten log of Marion Thomas Collins, Sr., my Dad.  He recorded these instructions for living a good life over a fifty-year period.

bookcover.jpg

Wit and Wisdom: Part 1 of 3 Parts

  • There is some good in the worst of us, and some bad in the best of us.

  • You may not be able to change faults in others, but you can change some of yours.

  • If two people talk at the same time, no one hears the other.

  • No government, family or business can survive without punishment for wrongdoing.

  • All kitchens should have a drawer for small tools, tape, glue, hammer and other small tools that you may need for repairs in the home.

  • Sometimes there is more to gain by being wrong than by being right.

  • Most arguments are two people who don’t know what they are arguing about.

  • It is far more impressive of for others to discover your good qualities without your help.

  • We are all born into the world with nothing.  Everything we acquire after that is profit.

  • If you want to move the world, you must first move yourself.

  • How sad would winter be if we had no expectation of spring.

  • If two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary.

  • The only thing that ever set its way to success was a hen.

  • Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.

  • Not all of us have talents, so common sense and love will have to do.

  • One never realizes how much or how little he knows until he or she starts talking.

  • Why don’t we say to ourselves, “This is a great time and moment in history, and I can and will make the most of it.”

    (To be continued)

# # # 

For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. Audio versions of The Claret Murders and  Diversion are available from iTunes, Audibles and Amazon. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com
Published by I-65 North, Inc.

MY MOHTER'S JOURNEY

Mother for obt.jpg

My mother, Alice Elsie Welch Collins, is ninety-eight years old.  She is now in the nursing care of hospice in the Memphis, Tennessee area. We expect her to leave us any day.

Mom was born August 22, 1919 in Grand Parish, Louisiana, the tenth child of John Ira (John) and Ardella (Della) Waits Welch. She was living in Monticello, LA at the time of the disaster known as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river reached a width of sixty miles. Her father died in August 1933 when she was just fourteen. The family broke apart, and she moved to Memphis to live with relatives. That is where she met and eventually married my dad, Marion Collins, in 1937.

With mom’s help, I published her story, My Journey, in 2009. I have attached a downloadable pdf. In My Journey, she wrote the following:

“We shared our home with many folks along the way and always made room for anyone needing a lift in life. The Lord gets the praise for the blessings he has given us…The Journey has been a long one and although we have had a few bumps along the way, we made it and now we are almost there.”

She will be greatly missed, but her journey will not end. It will go on through her four children, thirteen grandchildren, twenty-two great grandchildren, many nephews, nieces, and others whose life she touched.

# # #

For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to the TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. For Amazon go to www.amazon.com/Tom-Collins. For an audio edition of The Claret Murders go to http://amzn.com/B00IV5ZJEI. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com. For the new adventure novel on Amazon go to Diversion, A Mark Rollins Adventure


 Published by I-65 North, Inc.