Question of the Day
Why do anything at all?
Why do anything at all?
You can do what you want to do, accomplish what you want to accomplish, attain any reasonable objective you may have in mind...Not all of a sudden, perhaps, not in one swift and sweeping act of achievement...But you can do it gradually--day by day and play by play--if you want to do it, if you will to do it, if you work to do it, over a sufficiently long period of time.
How do you accomplish anything?
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
What are the empires of the future?
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
How do you be truly useful?
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
What is the value of using your mind?
You can never have a greater or a less dominion than over yourself.
What are the limits to mankind's capacity?
Keep your thoughts right--for as you think, so you are. Thoughts are things, therefore, think only the things that will make the world better and you unashamed.
What should you think?
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.
From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men--above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind is often troubled by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from the work of other men.
Why are we here?
Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money.
How do you start the money?
When you want a thing deeply, earnestly and intensely, this feeling of desire reinforces your will and arouses in you the determination to work for the desired object. When you have a distinct purpose in view, your work becomes of absorbing interest. You bend your best powers to it; you give it concentrated attention; you think of little else than the realization of this purpose; your will is stimulated into unusual activity, and as a consequence you do your work with an increasing sense of power.
What is the benefit if desire?
If business is going to continue to sell through the decades, it must also promote an understanding of what made those products possible, what is necessary to a free market, and what our free market means to the individual liberty of each of us, to be certain that the freedoms under which this nation was born and brought to this point shall endure in the future...for America is the product of our freedoms.
What value is freedom?
Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about. Practice what you know and it will help to make clear what you do not know.
Why should we practice?
Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horseman or chariots.
What is the power if an idea whose time has come?
National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
