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A
good character is a precious thing, above rubies, gold, crowns, or
kingdoms, and the work of making it is the noblest labor on earth.
Money-getting has well been called unhealthy when it
impoverishes the mind, or dries up the sources of the spiritual
life; when it extinguishes the sense of beauty, and makes one
indifferent to the wonders of nature and art; when it blunts the
moral sense, and confuses the distinction between right and wrong,
virtue and vice; when it stifles religious impulse, and blots all
thoughts of God from the soul.
It
is just as important to set apart time for the development of our
aesthetic faculties as for cultivating the money-getting instinct.
We cannot live by bread alone.
Our higher lives demand an impalpable food.
It takes a large bill of fare to feed an immortal being.
The mind and soul in a well-developed person are ever more
imperious in their demand for the true and the beautiful than is
the body for material food.
Character
is perpetual wealth, and by the side of those who possess it the
millionaire who has it not seems a pauper.
Compared with it, what are houses and lands, stocks and
bonds? “It is
better that great souls should live in small habitations than that
abject slaves should burrow in great houses.”
Plain living, rich thought, and grand effort are real
riches.
Neither
our means, nor our worth, are measurable by our money.
If we have a fat purse and a lean heart, a broad estate and
a narrow understanding, what will our “means” do for us—what will
our “worth” gain us?
What sadder sight is there than an old person who has spent
his or her whole life getting instead of growing?
If we have piled up books, statuary, and paintings, with
our wealth, we may be strangers amongst them.
How poor we are if our souls have shriveled to that of
misers, and if all our nobler instincts are dead!
Do
you call those successful who wear a bulldog expression that but
too plainly tells the story of how they gained their fortune, taking
but never giving? Can
you not read in those browbeating faces the sad experience of widows
and orphans? Do you
call them self-made people who have unmade others to make
themselves—who tear others down to build themselves up? Can we be really rich who make others poorer?
Can we be happy in whose every lineament, chronic avarice is
seen as plainly as hunger in the countenance of a wolf?
How seldom are sweet, serene, beautiful faces seen on
people who have been very successful as the world rates success!
Nature expresses in the face and manner the sentiment which
rules the heart. |
