WORLD'S OLDEST MAN GIVES 113TH BIRTHDAY SPEECH
Sat, 09/26/2009 - 4:38pm
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USA Today
September 24, 2009 http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-09-24-oldest-man-birthday-speech_N.htm Partial transcription from a written version of the speech Walter Breuning gave Monday afternoon at his 113th birthday party in the Rainbow retirement home ballroom. ... "Life begins each morning whether we have succeeded or failed or just muddled along. Life is a school to learn, not to unlearn. "Life is the creation by God and if you would know God, be not a solver of riddles. Look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. Look into the air and you shall see him walking in the clouds, out-stretching his arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving his hands in trees. "Life is a great teacher of truth. What is truth to one is not truth to another. What is true in one country may be false in another. "Life is short but the influences of what we do or say is immortal. There needs to be much more of the spirit of fellowship among us and more forgiveness. The power of gentleness is little seen in the world. "Remember that life's length is not measured by its hours and days, but by that which we have done therein. A useless life is short if it lasts a century. "There are greater and better things in us all if we would find them out. There will always be in this world -- wrongs. No wrong is really successful. "The day will come when light and truth and the just and the good shall be victorious and wrong as evil will be no more forever. "Life itself teaches us to best prepare for that future which we hope for and for that journey to that land un-known, not made by hands. "Everything just is beautiful; everything beautiful ought to be just. "The mystery of the world remains unknown. Our maker alone is the key which unlocks all the mysteries of the universe. "The world is neither a prison nor a palace of ease, but rather for instruction and discipline. "This world has been good to all of us." “If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is; but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
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