dleness and stagnation always mean deterioration and death of power.
No man can remain idle without shrinking, shrivelling, constantly
becoming a less efficient man; for he can keep up only those faculties
and powers which he constantly employs, and there is no other possible
way. Nature puts her ban of deterioration and loss of power upon
idleness. We see these victims everywhere shorn of power--weak,
nerveless, backboneless, staminaless, gritless people, without
forcefulness, mere nonentities because they have ceased working.
Without work mental health is impossible and without health the fullest
happiness is impossible.

It has been said that happiness is the most delusive thing that man
pursues. Yet why need it be a blind search?

If we were to stop the first hundred people we meet on the street and
ask them what in their experience has given them the most happiness,
probably the answer of no two would be alike.

How interesting and instructive it would be to give a thousand dollars
to each of these hundred people, and without their knowing it, follow
them and see what they would do with the money,--what it would mean to
them.

To some poor youth hungry for an education, with no opportunity to gain
it, this money would mean a college education. Another would see in
his money a more comfortable home for his aged parents. To another
this money would suggest all sorts of dissipation. Some would see
books and leisure for self-improvement, a trip abroad.

We all wear different colored glasses and no two see life with the same
tint.

Some find their present happiness in coarse dissipation; others in a
quiet nook with a book. Some find their greatest happiness in friends,
in social intercourse; others seek happiness in roving over the earth,
always thinking that the greatest enjoyment is in another day, in
another place, a little further on, in the next room, or to-morrow, or
in another country.

_To many people, happiness is never where they are, but almost anywhere
else_.

Most people lose sight of the simplicity of happiness. They look for
it in big, complicated things. Real happiness is perfectly simple. In
fact, it is incompatible with complexity. Simplicity is its very
essence.

I was dining recently with a particularly successful young man who is
trying very hard to be happy, but he takes such a complicated,
strenuous view of everything that his happiness is always flying from
him. He drives