Man leans two ways, but falls one.
From Taking Everything into Account, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The ice on the feeder pole held through the morning, and I watched a man on the sidewalk below stop in front of it with a bag of seed in one hand and his phone in the other. He stood there long enough that Switch came to see what the trouble was. He was leaning, that was all; a little toward the feeder, a little back toward the house, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a man deciding. Then his heel slid on the ice and he went down hard on the one side, the side he had not chosen. Man leans two ways, but falls one, and I used to think the leaning was the deciding. I am less sure now which of those he was doing when the ground took the question off him.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- Better to stumble on the right path than stride forward on the wrong one.
- No matter where you look for it, the sun only rises in the east.
- A know-it-all doesn’t and doesn’t know that he doesn’t.
- We have learned so much about how to make a better world, but not learned enough.
- The beginning of naming is the end of knowing.
- Call it what you will, it will be what it is.