As a young man, I thought sayings or aphorisms were just plain stupid. 53 years and several hard knocks later, I’ve learned to appreciate sayings for what they are- a pithy way to convey experiential wisdom.
Many I heard from my grandparents. Others were passed onto me by my late father. Several sayings came to me courtesy of countless in-home meetings with senior homeowners.
Here are a collection of sayings that will make you laugh, reflect, and commit to doing better the next time.
Download PDF of full list of sayings
- This too shall pass.~Persian adage
- It’s not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing. ~Chinese proverb
- As one thinks in their heart, so they are. ~Proverbs 23:7
- Shortcuts make long delays. ~J.R.R. Tolkein, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’
- You wake up one day and you realize that all these years have gone by and I have this mortgage and I have this couch and I have this life and… is this going to be my prison? ~Lynn Shelton
- The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.~Marcus Aurelius
- If there’s a will, there’s a way. ~Anonymous
- Necessity is the mother of invention. ~Plato
- The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors, that which it loves, and also that which it fears. ~James Allen, ‘As a Man Thinketh’
- Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. ~Erich Fromm
- Clear to close. Just kidding, still in underwriting ~Unknown
- A person only hears that which they understand. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- It is what it is. ~someone in New York City.
- Be yourself, everyone else is taken. ~Oscar Wilde
- It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up. ~Vince Lombardi
- If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. ~Mark Twain
- Action is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits. ~James Allen, ‘As a Man Thinketh’
- You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take ~ Wayne Gretzky
- To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail. ~Abraham
Maslow - We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. ~Aristotle
- People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily. ~ Zig Ziglar
- Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. ~Kurt Vonnegut
- I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter. ~Blaise Pascal
- Don’t ever wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it. ~ Cale Yarborough
- Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. ~Mark Twain
6 comments
Irish saying of the day
A craft ill learned is a curse
Jml
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so!” Mark Twain
So true. Another class Twain quote.
A friend of mine who did hundreds of HECMs before the housing value crash of 2008 left the industry over was his inability to answer this dilemma: My line of credit is zero. Now what am I supposed to do?
Most of these folks lived in the Moreno Valley and Riverside areas in Southern California where he focused on for years. They thought home prices would go up forever as would the lending limit. They were right about one thing. Back in those days, most us over got a split of the origination fee which run as high as $7,300 plus. Others of us saw great premiums from Cash Accounts TIPs, and other proprietary RMs. One all star earned a $250,000 commission from a CPA referral. A different time, a different era.
One saying that does not seem to die out is that one day soon, proprietary RM originations will exceed HECM originations by multiples. The first time I heard that was in a NRMLA meeting in 2007. The declaration was made by a former Chair at NRMLA with the FHA Commissioner sitting at the speakers’ table. A numerical prediction was made that by the end of the decade HECM originations would be just 20% of all RM originations. In those days HECM originations were over 100,000 per year. Imagine if total RM originations ever exceeded 500,000 in a single year. Currently that defies gravity.
OMG – almost spit out my coffee Shannon – “Clear to close, just kidding, still in underwriting.” Thank you for the laugh!
Glad you caught that! A little joy is a good thing.