All Difficulties May Be Overcome

There are few difficulties that hold out against real attacks: they fly like the visible horizon, before those who advance. A passionate desire and unwearied will, can perform impossibilities, or what seem to be such to the cold and the feeble. If we do but go on, some unseen path will open upon the hills. We must not allow ourselves to be discouraged by the apparent disproportion between the result of single efforts and the magnitude of the obstacles to be encountered. Nothing good or great is to be obtained without courage and industry; but courage and industry might have sunk in despair, and the world must have remained unornamented and unimproved, if men had nicely compared the effect of a single stroke of the chisel with the pyramid to be raised, or of a single impression of the spade with the mountain to be levelled. The toils as well as the risks of an active life are commonly overrated; so much may be done by the diligent use of ordinary opportunities; but they must not always be waited for. We must not only strike the iron whilst it is hot, but till “it is made hot.” The lazy, the dissipated and the fearful, should patiently see the active and the bold pass them in the course. They must bring down their pretensions to the level of their talents. Those who have not energy to work must learn to be humble, and should not vainly hope to unite the incompatible enjoyments of indolence and enterprise, of ambition and self-indulgence.