Original Maxims of James A. Garfield.
[Recitations for Ten Students.]
I.
A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.
II.
Poets may be born, but success is made.
III.
Be fit for more than the one thing you are now doing.
IV.
I would rather be beaten in right than succeed in wrong.
V.
Luck is an ignis fatuus. You may follow it to ruin, but not to success.
VI.
If the power to do hard work is not a talent, it is the best possible substitute for it.
VII.
I would rather be defeated than make capital out of my religion.
VIII.
Things don’t turn up in this world unless somebody turns them up.
IX.
Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and its valleys are its soil, its spirit, and its life.
X.
The privilege of being a young man is a great privilege, and the privilege of growing to be an independent man, in middle life, is a greater.
It is a strange fancy of mine, but I cannot help wishing we could move for returns—as their phrase is in parliament—for the suffering caused in any one day, or other period of time, throughout the world, to be arranged under certain heads; and we should then see what the world has occasion to fear most. What a large amount would come under the heads of unreasonable fear of others, of miserable quarrels amongst relations upon infinitesimally small subjects, of imaginary slights, of undue cares, of false shames, of absolute misunderstandings, of unnecessary pains to maintain credit or reputation, of vexation that we cannot make others of the same mind with ourselves! What a wonderful thing it would be to see set down in figures, as it were, how ingenious we are in plaguing one another!—Arthur Helps.