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The Joy of Labour
Wise men of ancient times and successful men of today have told us that labor is sweet. Its reward is not material gain but what one becomes by it. Work does much more for us than just giving us a living; it gives us our life and the reason for living. The real joys of life come from doing something and doing it well.
All of us hope for success, but it is illusive and hard to keep. It nearly always slips away from one like sand through the fingers, like water through a leaky pail, unless it is held tight by hard work, day by day, night by night, year in year out. Everyone who fears failure should work harder and harder with a faithful heart as long as he lasts.

Lincoln?s Gettysburg Address

By Abraham Lincoln
Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate?we cannot consecrate? we cannot hallow?this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that this Nation, under GOD, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the People by the People and for the People shall not perish from the earth."

Self-control is essential to happiness and usefulness. It is the master of all the virtues, and has its root in self-respect. Let a man yield to his impulses and passions, and from that moment he gives up his moral freedom.
It is the self-discipline of a man that enables him to pursue success with superior diligence and sobriety. Many of the great characters in his illustrate this trait. In ordinary life the application is the same. He who would lead must first command himself. The time of test is when everybody is excited or angry, then the well-balanced mind comes to the front.
There is a very special demand for the cultivation of this trait at present. The young men who rush into business with no good education or drill will do poor and feverish work. Endurance is a much better test of character than act of heroism.
A fair amount of self-examination is good. Self-knowledge is a preface to self-control. Too much self-inspection leads to morbidness; too little conducts to careless and hasty action. There are two things which will surely strengthen our self-control. One is attention to conscience; the other is a spirit of good will. The man who would succeed in any great undertaking must hold all his faculties under perfect control; they must be disciplined and drilled until they quickly and cheerfully obey the will.

Joy in living comes from having fine emotions, trusting them, giving them the freedom of a bird in the open. Joy in living can never be assumed as a pose, or put on from the outside as a mask. People who have this joy do not need to talk about it; they radiate it. they just live out their joy and let it splash its sunlight and glow into other lives as naturally as a bird sings.
And those who have and exhibit the joy of living are never those who have been without care, sorrow, failure, disappointment, and discouragement. They are rather those who have suffered and conquered, and who are willing to bear their share of the vicissitudes of life uncomplainingly.
The joy of living never comes to the frivolous, the superficial, the selfish. We can never get it by working for it directly. It comes, like happiness, to those who are aiming at something higher. It is a by-product of great, simple living. The joy of living comes from what we put into living, not from what we seek to get from it.

By A.T. Rowe

We are on a Journey
By:Henry Van Dyke:



Wherever you are, and whoever you may be, there is one thing in which you and I are just alike at this moment, and in all the moments of our existence. We are not at rest; we are on a journey. Our life is a movement, a tendency, a steady, ceaseless progress towards an unseen goal. We are gaining something, or losing something, every day. Even when our position and our character seem to remain precisely the same, they are changing, for the mere advance of time is a charge. It is not the same thing to have a bare field in January and in July. The season makes the difference. The limitations that are childlike in the child are childish in the man.Everything that we do is a step in one direction or another. Even the failure to do something is in itself a deed. It sets us forward or backward. The action of the negative pole of a magnetic needle is just as real as the action of the positive pole. To decline is to accept the other alternative.Are you nearer to your port today than you were yesterday? Yes, you must be a little nearer to some port or other; for since your ship was launched upon the sea of life, you have never been still for a single moment ?the sea is too deep; you could not find an anchorage if you would; there can be no pause until you come into port.

by :Ernest Hemingway
In a calm sea every man is a polite.But all sunshine without shade, all pleasure without pain, is not life at all. Take the lot of happiest?it is a tangled yarn. Bereavements and blessings, one following another, make us sad and blessed by turns. Even death itself makes life more loving. Men come closed to their true selves in the sober moments of life, under the shadows of sorrow and loss. In the affairs of life or of business, it is not intellect that tells so much as character, not brains so much as heart, not genius so much as self-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.I have always believed that the man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without. In an age of extravagance and waste, I wish I could show to the world how few the real wants of humanity are.To regret one?s errors to the point of not repeating them is true repentance. There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The real nobility is in being superior to your previous self.