Good cheer abounding and love all-surrounding,
I shall keep building the best that I can.
Prepare yourself for the world as the athletes used to do for their exercises; oil your mind and your manners to give them the necessary suppleness and flexibility; strength alone will not do.—Chesterfield.
“Give, O give us, the man who sings at his work!” says Thomas Carlyle. “Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time—he will do it better—he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible to fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance. Efforts to be permanently useful must be uniformly joyous—a spirit all sunshine—grateful for very gladness, beautiful because bright.”
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.—Matthew Arnold.
In all things, to serve from the lowest station upwards is necessary.—Goethe.
To do nothing by halves is the way of noble minds.—Wieland.
Have you a cheerful member in your circle of friends, a cheerful neighbor in the vicinity of your home? Cherish him as a pearl of great price. He is of real, practical value to all with whom he comes in contact. His presence in a neighborhood ought to make real estate sell for a bit more a square foot, and life more prized by all who partake of his good cheer. He greets the world with a smile and a laugh—a real laugh, born of thought and feeling—not a superficial veneer of humor the falsity of which is detected by all who hear it. “How much lies in laughter,” says Carlyle “It is the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man. Some men wear an everlasting simper; in the smile of another lies the cold glitter, as of ice; the fewest are able to laugh what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snicker from the throat outward, or at least produce some whiffing, husky cachination, as if they were laughing through wool. Of none such comes good.”
Whatever your occupation may be, and however crowded your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry.—Charles Eliot Norton.
Do you like the boy who in a game of ball is whining all the time because he cannot be constantly at the bat?