How to Succeed
we have too much of it. We want men who will do right, though the heaven
ou have him at hand. This man-it is you, it is I; it is each one of us!... How to constitute one's self
t a convention. "Louder! louder!" shouted a man in the audience; "we can't hear." "Get up hig
gher than being a Baptist
o fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters little to me whether my pupil be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar. To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have d
asked what he meant to be, "I must make myself a man;
e at Athens; and, when a crowd collected around him,
ve a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health. It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life and beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in mere an
wyer by keeping out of debt; the demagogue, by voti
honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man, as he looked contemptuously upon their dim
out crutches or a guide. Said Jean Paul Richter: "I have made as much out
a sage," wrote Voltaire to Helvetius;
d, for any position, whether as a domestic servant, an office boy, a teacher, a brakeman, a conductor, an engineer, a clerk, a bookkeeper, or whatever we may want. I
g, many are so ignorant, so deficient in the common rudiments even, that they spell badly, use bad grammar, and know scarc
sible to get a first-class mechanic; he has not learned his trade; he has picked it u
ill and faithfulness, but usually they have been d
and specialties, removed alike from the broad truth of nature and from the healthy influence of human converse. In societ
o secure the highest and most harmonious developmen
everything, to have read everything, to have seen everything. Nothing seems to escape the keenness of their vision. But somehow they are forever disappointing
man who does not look upon his congregation from the standpoint of old theological books, and dusty, cobweb creeds, but who sees the merchant as in his store, the clerk as making sales, the lawyer pleading before the jury, the physician standing over the sick bed;
ver the door of every profession, every
me the victim of his specialty, a
e so much larger than his calling, so broad and symmetrical in his culture, that h
fessions. Specialties facilitate commerce, and promote efficiency in the professions, but are often narrowing to individuals
anding beside a machine for making screws. There is nothing to call out hi
nism. His powers, from lack of use, dwindle to mediocrity, to inferi
rowd, a man who has the courage of his convictions, who
e great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his manhood; who will not al
tion to value it merely as a means of getting a living. Wanted, a man who sees self-develop
prizes, which we may almost touch, but never quite possess. She covers up her ends of discipline by trial, of character building through suffering by throwing a splendor and glamour over the future; lest the hard, dry facts of the present dishearten us, and she fail in her great purpose. How else could Nature call the youth away from all the charms that hang around young life, but by presenting to his imagination pictures of futur
nds its real significance not in itself, but, pointing to the central idea, finds its true expression there. So in the vast universe of God, every object of creation is but a guide-board with an index
om, set thy
anhood-let i
undless thea
to God ... whi
ou