Have you your music lesson well in hand for this afternoon? If so, that means success.
Have you been kind to everybody to-day, and with a pleasant word and a willing hand, done all you could to make life pleasanter and happier for those about you? If so, that is a fine moral success. And if you will multiply the Not so much beautiful features as a beautiful soul can make a beautiful face.—Margaret E. Sangster. achievements of to-day by the days that are in the years before you, you can see the result that you have a reason to expect, as your life’s work.
Success means doing all that we can do as well as we can do it. It may be There is a marvelous power in a well-defined individuality.—Joe Mitchell Chapple. work or it may be play. It may be something of seemingly little account or it may be something of importance, but unless we do it well, and to the best of our ability it will not be a success.
"Every day," says Bunsen, "ought to be begun as a serious work, standing alone in itself, and yet connected with the past and the future." And Ruskin still further emphasizes this thought in the words: "Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close; then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some Resolution always gives us courage.— A. E. Winship. kindly thing done for others."
We begin to achieve success when we do the things that are necessary for such achievement. Huxley expressed the Of all fruitless errands, sending a tear to look after a day that has gone is the most fruitless.—Dickens. whole secret of the matter when he said: "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, as it ought to be done, whether you like to do it or not."
A good life, which is but another name for success, does not come You can never be wise unless you love reading.—Johnson. by accident. Fortune may seem to favor it but it is the disposition to seize upon the opportunities that present themselves that make some lives seem more blest with "good chances" than others.
Self cultivation is the secret of most all attainments in the realm of human endeavor. As a matter of fact, all that others can do for us is as nothing to The perfecting of one’s self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.—Confucius. that which we may do for ourselves. Persons who do things usually have to work for results, or they have at some time had to work to acquire the habits that later on make it seem so easy for them to do fine things. "We think," says J. C. Van Dyke, "because the completed work looks easy or reads easy, that it must have been done easily. But the geniuses of the world have all put upon record their conviction that there is more virtue in perspiration than in inspiration. The Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.—Ruskin. great poets, whether in print or in paint, have spent their weeks and months—yes, years—composing, adjusting, putting in and taking out. They have known what it is to ’lick things into shape,’ to labor and be baffled, to despair and to hope anew."
With the dawning of every morning, life comes bringing to us a new and It is not a lucky word, this same impossible; no good comes to those who have it so often in their mouth.—Carlyle. wonderful day to employ it as we will. Shall it be a fine, gratifying success, or shall it be a failure? Shall it be part success and part failure? There can be no doubt about it being a matter that is very largely in our own keeping.
MORNING GATES
Each golden dawn presents two gates
That open to the day;
Through one a path of joy awaits,
I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.—Shakespeare. Through one a weary way.
Choose well, for by that choice is willed
If ye shall be distressed
At eventide, or richly filled
With strength and peace and rest.