LIVE UPWARD.
"Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven,
And this thy last deed ere the judgment day."
If you wish to reach the highest begin at the lowest.
—Publius Syrus.
What is a man,
If his chief good, and market of his time,
Be but to sleep, and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure He, that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before, and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike Reason
To rust in us unused.
—Shakespeare.
Ambition is the spur that makes man struggle with destiny. It is heaven's own incentive to make purpose great and achievement greater. —Anonymous.
"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."
"Endeavor to be first in thy calling, whatever it
may be; neither let anyone go before thee in well
doing."
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
—George Eliot.
"Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne and myself have founded empires," said Napoleon to Montholon at St. Helena; "but upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire on love, and at this moment millions of men would die for Him. I die before my time and my body will be given back to worms. Such is the fate of him who has been called the great Napoleon. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ, which is proclaimed, loved and adored, and which is extended over the whole earth. Call you this dying? Is it not rather living? The death of Christ is the death of a God."
"No true man can live a half life," says Phillips Brooks, "when he has genuinely learned that it is a half life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him."