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Page 42 of
50.
We do not feel called upon to
repeat the many astonishing but withal correct calculations which have been
worked out regarding the penny saved every day and laid carefully away.
Nevertheless, it will be very much to our advantage to look around us and to
prove to ourselves that the people who practice a wise economy generally end by
being able to permit themselves, by virtue of the resources they have
accumulated, a good deal more of the comforts of life than do certain prodigal
folk who have been infinitely better off right along, monetarily speaking, than
they have.
Thus we see that without perseverance it is impossible to economize. Lacking it,
the desired goal will always be lost sight of in the urgent need for momentary
satisfaction.
When we are able to visualize it once more, we shall be grieved to see that it
is still farther off than before, and that our previous efforts have been
practically brought to naught by our thoughtlessness of the moment.
Perseverance is also a source of continual joy to those who have learned the
feeling of exhilaration that success brings with it.
Successes very seldom come singly.
They are nearly always the result of a number of realizations, all of which have
their part in the production of the final achievement.
Moreover the man who knows what each one of these minor successes costs him will
feel a real satisfaction in accomplishing them.
One might compare him to a jeweler, devoted to his art, who chisels out with
infinite care a quantity of links, which, when taken together, will form a
beautiful chain.
He knows very well that these links, when taken one by one, are worth relatively
little, and that it is only their number and their union into a perfect chain
that gives them their value.
The magnificent collections that we admire so often have been brought together
in a precisely similar way.
One can not help smiling at the inexperience of the man who has the idea that he
can get together a collection of this sort in one moment.
It is only by dint of minute and patient research that one is able first of all
to find, and finally to assemble together, a number of objects that all belong
to the same family.
But what joy one feels when one discovers a rarity, and experiences in watching
the increase in number of one's artistic treasures.
Let us hasten to add that in such a case as this art is not the only
consideration, and that wealth is very frequently the reward of the patience and
tenacity of a collector.
Another form of perseverance that is relative to the affairs of our every-day
life is the knowledge of the value of time.
The man who, by the judicious employment of the qualities that go to the making
of per- severance, devotes himself whole-heartedly to a piece of work and
knows how to concentrate upon it all his thoughts and all his acts, lives with
infinitely greater intensity than the man in whose life one attempt follows
another continually at more or less frequent intervals.
This can be explained in a simple manner.
It can not be disputed that the time that one gives to an effort that does not
last and that inevitably results in a check of some kind should be considered as
just so many minutes or hours lost to our lives.
This time, during which one has lived merely to attain a certain object, which
is afterward abandoned, can be classed without any further argument in the
category of wasted hours, or to express it better, hours in which we have not
really lived.
Those are greatly to be commiserated whose lives contain many of these hours.
They are nearly always the prey of melancholy and discouragement. They easily
become extremely irritable, and their discontent with themselves exhibits itself
in a spirit of quarrelsome contradictoriness that makes them the terror of
their families.
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