To him who presses on, at each degree new visions rise.—Julia Ward Howe.
To doubt is failure, and to dare, success.—Frederick Lawrence Knowles.
It’s nothing against you to fall down flat, but to lie there is disgrace.—Edmund Vance Cooke.
Where is the boy who cannot see the fallacy in such illogical reasoning as this: “Now, I will be careless while I am young so that I may be careful when I am older. I will remain ignorant and poorly informed while I am a boy, so that I may be wise when I am a man. I will bend one way while I am a twig so that I shall incline in another direction when I become a tree. I will do wrong things while my character is being formed so that I may do right things when my habits become fixed.” All such reasoning is very, very foolish, isn’t it? And yet there are some illogical youths who deem it will be easy to have one character and disposition as boys and quite a different one when they come to be men. By some strange hocus-pocus they hope to be able to sow a crop of “wild oats” and later on reap a harvest of good wheat. It cannot be done.
Do it right now and do it well.—John Townsend Trowbridge.
Any farmer’s boy will tell you that “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” When the farmer wishes to harvest wheat he does not sow oats. When he wishes a crop of potatoes he does not plant gourds. He has learned that what he plants in the spring he will harvest in the autumn. It is equally as true of life. That which we sow in youth we reap in our maturer years. We must not try to deceive nature and our own consciences. We shall get back from the years what we give to the years.
Condemn no creed! Dig deep beneath the sod and at the root thou’lt find the truth of God.—Alicia K. Van Buren.
The boy who early gets into the habit of doing things right is pretty sure to go on doing them so all his life, and without much effort on his part. The will is strengthened by exercise in the same manner as are the muscles. We learn to do easily that which we do often.
It is adversity, not prosperity, which breeds men; as it is the storm, and not the calm, which makes the mariner.—Melvin L. Severy.
The slow long way may be the best.—Nathan Haskell Dole.