Authors: Brett McKay
The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues (12 page)
“It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a failure in life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases to struggle, which remains inactive, rapidly deteriorates. It is the struggle toward an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further, which develops manhood and character.” —James Terry White
F
ROM
R
EADINGS FOR
Y
OUNG
M
EN
, M
ERCHANTS, AND
M
EN OF
B
USINESS
, 1859
We love upright, energetic men. Pull them this way, and then that way, and the other, and they only bend, but never break. Trip them down, and in a trice they are on their feet. Bury them in the mud, and in an hour they will be out and bright. They are not ever yawning away existence, or walking about the world as if they had come into it with only half their soul; you cannot keep them down; you cannot destroy them. But for these the world would soon degenerate. They are the salt of the earth. Who but they start any noble project? They build our cities and rear our manufactories; they whiten the ocean with their sails; they draw treasures from the mine; they plow the earth. Blessings on them! Look to them, young men, and take courage; imitate their example; catch the spirit of their energy and enterprise, and you will deserve, and no doubt command, success.
“Rest not! Life is sweeping by,
Go and dare, before you die;
Something mighty and sublime
Leave behind to conquer time!”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
F
ROM
P
USHING TO THE
F
RONT
, 1894
By Orison Swett Marden
On the floor of the gold-working room, in the United States Mint at Philadelphia, there is a wooden lattice-work which is taken up when the floor is swept, and the fine particles of gold-dust, thousands of dollars’ yearly, are thus saved. So every successful man has a kind of network to catch “the raspings and parings of existence, those leavings of days and wee bits of hours” which most people sweep into the waste of life. He who hoards and turns to account all odd minutes, half hours, unexpected holidays, gaps between times, and chasms of waiting for unpunctual persons, achieves results which astonish those who have not mastered this most valuable secret.
The days come to us like friends in disguise, bringing priceless gifts from an unseen hand; but, if we do not use them, they are borne silently away, never to return. Each successive morning new gifts are brought, but if we failed to accept those that were brought yesterday and the day before, we become less and less able to turn them to account, until the ability to appreciate and utilize them is exhausted. Wisely was it said that lost wealth may be regained by industry and economy, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance and medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
“Oh, it’s only five minutes or ten minutes till meal-time; there’s no time to do anything now,” is one of the commonest expressions heard in the family. But what monuments have been built up by poor boys with no chance, out of broken fragments of time which many of us throw away! The very hours you have wasted, if improved, might have insured your success.
The author of “Paradise Lost” was a teacher, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Secretary of the Lord Protector, and had to write his sublime poetry whenever he could snatch a few minutes from a busy life. John Stuart Mill did much of his best work as a writer while a clerk in the East India House. Galileo was a surgeon, yet to the improvement of his spare moments the world owes some of its greatest discoveries.
If a genius like Gladstone carried through life a little book in his pocket lest an unexpected spare moment slip from his grasp, what should we of common abilities not resort to, to save the precious moments from oblivion? … Many a great man has snatched his reputation from odd bits of time which others, who wonder at their failure to get on, throw away. In Dante’s time nearly every literary man in Italy was a hardworking merchant, physician, statesman, judge, or soldier.
Oh, the power of ceaseless industry to perform miracles!
One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits and profitably employed would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science. One hour a day would in ten years make an ignorant man a well-informed man. … In an hour a day a boy or a girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully—over seven thousand pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year.
An hour a day might make all the difference between bare existence and useful, happy living. An hour a day might make—nay, has made—an unknown man a famous one, a useless man a benefactor to his race. Consider, then, the mighty possibilities of two—four—yes, six hours a day that are, on the average, thrown away by young men.
Every young man should have a hobby to occupy his leisure hours, something useful to which he can turn with delight. It might be in line with his work or otherwise, only
his heart must be in it.
If one chooses wisely, the study, research, and occupation that a hobby confers will broaden character and transform the home.
“He has nothing to prevent him but too much idleness, which, I have observed,” says Burke, “fills up a man’s time much more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.”
Some boys will pick up a good education in the odds and ends of time which others carelessly throw away, as one man saves a fortune by small economies which others disdain to practise. What young man is too busy to get an hour a day for self-improvement?
Great men have ever been misers of moments. Cicero said: “What others give to public shows and entertainments, nay, even to mental and bodily rest, I give to the study of philosophy.” Lord Bacon’s fame springs from the work of his leisure hours while Chancellor of England. During an interview with a great monarch, Goethe suddenly excused himself, went into an adjoining room and wrote down a thought for his “Faust,” lest it should be forgotten. … Pope would often rise in the night to write out thoughts that would not come during the busy day. Grote wrote his matchless “History of Greece” during the hours of leisure snatched from his duties as a banker.
Dr. Darwin composed most of his works by writing his thoughts on scraps of paper wherever he happened to be. Watt learned chemistry and mathematics while working at his trade of a mathematical instrument-maker. Henry Kirke White learned Greek while walking to and from the lawyer’s office where he was studying. Dr. Burney learned Italian and French on horseback. Matthew Hale wrote his “Contemplations” while traveling on his circuit as judge.
The present time is the raw material out of which we make whatever we will. Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and
get your lesson from the hour.
The man is yet unborn who rightly measures and fully realizes the value of an hour. As Fenelon says, God never gives but one moment at a time, and does not give a second until he withdraws the first.
The worst of a lost hour is not so much in the wasted time as in the wasted power. Idleness rusts the nerves and makes the muscles creak. Work has system, laziness has none.
In factories for making cloth a single broken thread ruins a whole web; it is traced back to the girl who made the blunder and the loss is deducted from her wages. But who shall pay for the broken threads in life’s great web? We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle; threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our fate. It may be a shoddy thread of wasted hours or lost opportunities that will mar the fabric and mortify the workman forever; or it may be a golden thread which will add to its beauty and luster.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” —Thomas Edison
By Edward Rowland Sill, 1880
This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought: “Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears—but this
Blunt thing—!” he snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause on that heroic day.
“Mankind is more indebted to industry than ingenuity; the gods set up their favors at a price, and industry is the purchaser.” —Joseph Addison
F
ROM
S
ELF
-C
ULTURE
T
HROUGH THE
V
OCATION
, 1914
By Edward Howard Griggs
There is an almost universal optical illusion with reference to work: each of us is fully conscious of the dead work in his own calling, because he must fulfill it; with the tasks of others, he sees only the finished product. Thus each is inclined to exaggerate the dead work in his own vocation and to envy the apparently easier and happier tasks of others. You sit down in an audience room, and some master at the piano sweeps you out on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, playing with you at his will. The evening of melody is over; there is the moment of awed silence and then the storm of applause; you go home exclaiming, “What genius!” O yes, it is genius: someone has defined genius as the capacity for hard work. Genius is more than that—much more; but no exaggerated talent would take a man far, without the capacity for hard work; and what you forget, as you listen to the finished art of the master genius, is the days and nights of consecrated toil, foregoing, not only dissipation, but even innocent pleasures others take as their natural right, that the artist might master and keep the mastery of the technique of his art.
It is said of Euclid, formulator of the earliest of the sciences, geometry, that on one occasion he was called in to teach a certain king of Egypt his new science. He began as we begin, with definition, axiom and proposition—we have not improved appreciably upon his text-book; and the king grew restless and indignant: “Must a Pharaoh learn like a common slave?” Euclid, with that pride in knowing one thing well, that everyone ought to have who knows one science thoroughly to the end, responded: “There is no royal road to geometry!” We can universalize the statement: there is no royal road to anything on earth—perhaps in heaven either—worth having, except the one broad, open highway, with no toll-gates upon it, of dead, hard, consistent work through the days and years. Spinoza said—it is the last word in his
Ethic
: “All noble things are as difficult as they are rare;” and we may add, they are rare because they are difficult.
