John Bunyan, author of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is said to have obtained a larger circulation than any other book in English except the Bible, was a tinker. Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and most influential naturalist of the eighteenth century, was a shoemaker’s apprentice.
As a matter of fact, a man’s first duty is to mind his own business.—Lorimer.
George Stephenson, the English engineer and inventor, was in his youth a stoker in a colliery, learning to read and write at a workingmen’s evening school. Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-jenny, and founder of the great cotton industries of England, never saw the inside of a school-house until after he was twenty years of age, having long served as a barber’s assistant.
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.—Whipple.
John Jacob Astor began life as a peddler in the streets of New York, where his descendants now own real estate worth hundreds of millions.
Civility costs nothing and buys everything.—Lady Montague.
Shakespeare in his youth was a wool-carder.
Cheerful looks make every dish a feast.—Massinger.
Thousands of other examples might be mentioned to show that lowly birth is no barrier to lofty attainment. It has been truly said that genius ignores all social barriers and springs forth wherever heaven has dropped the seed. The grandest characters known in art, literature, and the useful inventions, have illustrated the axiom that “brave deeds are the ancestors of brave men,” and, as Ballou has told us, “it would almost appear that an element of hardship is necessary to the effective development of true genius. Indeed, when we come to the highest achievements of the greatest minds, it seems that they were not limited by race, condition of life, or the circumstances of their age.”
Character, good or bad, has a tendency to perpetuate itself.—Hodge.