Portraits and principles of the world's great men and women
With practical lessons on successful life by over fifty leading thinkers.
Life to each of us is an ever-changing panorama. The sights of yesterday are old, the scenes of today are swiftly passing, and the pictures of tomorrow will be new. Each day comes freighted with greater opportunities and enlarged interests. To meet these constantly increasing responsibilities, our lives should be developed along practical lines.
This volume points out and illustrates the principles which must govern the minds and hearts of those who would succeed and make the most of life and its possibilities. The qualities of every noble life have their foundation in the truths unfolded in this volume, and, living these truths, men have made their lives grandly successful. The great problem of the ages and the burning question of today is, " How to Succeed." Every generation of the past has been confronted by this problem, and each individual is today asking the same vital question.
The hopes and hearts of men are all alike. They may differ in degree, but never in kind. Your hopes are like mine. I wish for happiness, so do you. I desire to succeed, so do you. Our ideals of happiness or success may differ, but each is striving for that ideal we call success. No person in his right mind ever yet wished for ruin to his hopes. How to bring our hopes to fruitage is the problem each one of us is labouring to solve.
This volume solves the problem, and if it shall be the means of awakening aspirations for success along noble lines in the minds of the young men and women of our land, to whom it is especially sent; if it shall arouse greater zeal, or give new courage to any faltering traveller, or if it shall arrest any careless feet from going astray, then the great aim and purpose of the book and its writers will be accomplished, and the noblemen and women whose portraits, principles, and careers are here set forth, will live anew in other lives, bringing such blessings to the individual and to the world, as only eternity will fully reveal.
Success is a relative term and varies in its meaning with the nature of one's business in life. In a battle, to win a victory over the foe is a success. If you start out on a journey, reaching the point of destination is a success.
The physician who saves his patients, the lawyer who gains his case, the political leader who obtains office, the merchant who profitably extends his trade, the manufacturer who widens commerce, the agriculturist who multiplies the product of the soil, the man of science or, discovery who enlarges the sum of human knowledge, each, in his own sphere, reaches a success that is relative, more or less, complete. And none the less surely does he succeed in life, who, it may be as an unknown and humble toiler, earns an honest living by useful labour, and by the uprightness of his life, example, and influence adds to the sum total of private and civic virtue. For to do good, and to become good, is the noblest pursuit of mortals.
Goodness is everlasting and rewards its possessor with its own length of days. He who has done his best to obtain goodness has reached the very highest success that the heavens know. Said Cicero, "Right is not founded on opinion, but in nature." And goodness is not of the earth, but of God, and he who gets it joins himself thereby with the Creator of all things, and must succeed. Not necessarily in this world, but somewhere, he must and will succeed. Here indeed it often happens that man's successful man and God's successful man have no resemblance whatever to each other. So much then as to what is implied by success.
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