"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles. "If there were no difficulties, there would be no success. In this necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human advancement,—the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."
"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when entering the Birmingham orchestra. "Don't tell me what you like but what you don't like."
John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as their successes.
"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody. "Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem discouragements. But if they are properly met, they are not what they seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances. There is no more helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."
It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to hear!
It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote." He was so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his writing, and had to write on scraps of leather. A rich Spaniard was asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world rich."
"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."
"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something, everything. If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she would be the greatest singer in Europe."
"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is spoiled by the ease with which he composes."
We do our best while fighting desperately to attain what the heart covets. Martin Luther did his greatest work, and built up his best character, while engaged in sharp controversy with the Pope. Later in life his wife asks, "Doctor, how is it that whilst subject to Papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"