Blog 3685 – 12.07.2025

You Can’t Please Everyone All the Time

Even people pleasers like myself eventually learn like the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but actual from !15th-century poet John Lydgate that it is impossible to please all the people all the time. The full quote is:

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

Sadly, it sometimes seems that the one we want to please the most – a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, a former or would be lover, we find it impossible to please at all. Jesus’ answer to his disciples’ question about what to do when a whole town rejected their encouraging words (good news) was not to call down fire upon them, but to just shake the dust off their feet and move on.

Another misattributed quote comes to mind: “Insanity is doing the same things over and over expecting different results.” Though it is often attributed to Albert Einstein the earliest known versions appear in Narcotics Anonymous literature in 1981 and later in a 1983 novel by Rita Mae Brown. Though Einstein probably never said these exact words they are a pretty wise observation nonetheless.

I tried very hard to convince my first wife to come with me to my final duty station after I came home from Vietnam. My home pastor, her uncle by marriage, wrote me that she had told him emphatically that she would never live with me and so I got a lawyer and filed for a divorce. I recall a line from the final divorce decree, “It is no longer safe nor sane for this couple to co-habit.”

We have a tendency to play the what-if game with the past. “if only I had done this or that, if only I had tried harder.” In subsequent relationships I did, I think, try harder and longer, but to misquote a Collin Raye song, “You know the time comes when a wise man knows the best thing he can do is…face the bitter truth.” 

Rick Nelson’s last big hit song Garden Party says it best – “You can’t please everyone so you got to please yourself.” Selfish? Perhaps, but even Jesus great love command says that we are to love God and others as we love ourselves, loving ourselves being, I think, the prerequisite to being able to love anyone else.

Please yourself and be one of those you can please all of the time.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZenRxHqwY1KHVoQTcJQx_fEvdeioTA7S/view?usp=drivesdk

Garden Party