He would know

"For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison."
President Theodore Roosevelt
(Also Vice-president, Governor, Secretary of Navy, cowboy, prolific author, world traveler, well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize winner, war hero, and father of six, apparently not in that order.)

How do you FEEL about your smile?

I couldn't believe it. For the first time in my life I was half an hour early for a medical appointment, and how was I rewarded? "We need you to update your medical information." What kind of perverse logic prompts professionals who serve older adults to print their forms in an 8 point font? Anyway, I'm plodding along, gratefully checking the "no" box for most of the diseases listed, and then they ask, "How do you feel about your smile?"
What a strange question. More to the point--How do YOU feel about my smile? Does it call up a smile in return, does it brighten your day at all, build you up in any way, or cause you to praise God for any reason? Or at least make you wonder what I'm up to? If any of the above, then I feel just fine about my smile, thank you.

Where are the great men?...#2

"He was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices, a private citizen without wrong, a neighbor without reproach, a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guilt. He was Caesar without his ambition, Frederick without his tyranny, Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington without his reward."
Benjamin H. Hill (1832-1882)
Quoted in Robert E. Lee, 1911, by Thomas Nelson Page

A little election advice from the year 1630

"He that hath a head of wax must not walk in the sun."
Outlandish Proverb #421;
Collected by George Herbert

Where does that leave us?

"Only a soft-headed, sentimental and rather servile generation of men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form of self-praise. Almost any other man in almost any other age would have seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, "Ugg says Ugg makes the best stone hatchets," he would have perceived a lack of detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said to a medieval peasant, "Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts of a horn, that he makes good bows," the peasant would have said, "Well, of course he does," and thought about something more important. It is only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have been tried at all." G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America.