p. 67 | HARD WORK

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 27, 1879

HARD WORK.

“WHAT is your secret?” asked a lady of Turner, the distinguished painter. He replied, “I have no secret, madam, but hard work.”

Says Dr. Arnold: “The difference between one man and another is not so much in talent as in energy.”

“Nothing,” says Reynolds, “is denied well-directed labor, and nothing is to be attained without it.”

“Excellence in any department,” says Johnson, “can now be attained by the labor of a lifetime; but it is not to be purchased at a less price.”

“There is but one method,” says Sidney Smith, “and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for distinction had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of a fox.”

“Step by step,” reads the French proverb, “one goes very far.”

“Nothing,” says Mirabeau, “is impossible to a man who can and will. This is the only law of success.”

“Have you ever entered a cottage, or traveled in a coach, ever talked with a peasant in a field, or loitered with a mechanic at a loom,” asked Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, “without finding that each of these men had a talent you have not—knew something you did not?”

The most useless creature that yawned at a club or idled in rags under the suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect. What men want is not talent, but purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.—Selected.