There is no real life but cheerful life.—Addison.
When Carlyle had finished the first volume of his “French Revolution” he lent the manuscript to a friend to read. A maid, finding what she supposed to be a bundle of waste paper on the parlor floor used it to light the kitchen fire. Without spending any time in uttering lamentations, the author set to work and triumphantly reproduced the book in the form in which it now appears.
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.—Thoreau.
There is one thing in this world better than making a living, and that is making a life.—Russell.
“How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it! I will only add to what I have already written of perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong point of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success.” Such is Charles Dickens’s testimony to the value of sticking to it.
A man must be one of two things; either a reed shaken by the wind, or a wind to shake the reeds.—Handford.
One of the clever characters created by the pen of George Horace Lorimer says: “Life isn’t a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can’t run far up hill without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day’s work, and then spend six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and use up all their wind in that. And when they’ve rested and got it back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction.”
There is nothing at all in life except what we put there.—Madame Swetchine.
Says the poet, James Whitcomb Riley, “For twenty years I tried to get into one magazine; back came my manuscripts eternally. I kept on. In the twentieth year that magazine accepted one of my articles.”
He is, in my opinion, the noblest who has raised himself by his own merit to a higher station.—Cicero.