if it is not healthful, if it is degrading, if it is narrowing,
don't touch it.

A selfish vocation never pays. If it belittles the manhood, blights the
affections, dwarfs the mental life, chills the charities and shrivels
the soul, don't touch it. Choose that occupation, if possible, which
will be the most helpful to the largest number.

It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles on which
they made their fortune.

One of the greatest hindrances to advancement and promotion in life is
the lack of observation and the disinclination to take pains. A keen,
cultivated observation will see a fortune where others see only poverty.
An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
ill afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a metallic
lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather." He succeeded in
doing so and now he is a very rich man.

An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on shears for cutting hair, and invented "clippers" and
became very rich. A Maine man was called from the hayfield to wash out
the clothes for his invalid wife. He had never realized what it was to
wash before. He invented the washing-machine and made a fortune. A man
who was suffering terribly with toothache, said to himself, "There must
be some way of filling teeth to prevent them aching;" he invented gold
filling for teeth.

The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has been the
mother of all great inventions. Ericsson began the construction of a
screw-propeller in a bath-room. John Harrison, the great inventor of the
marine chronometer, began his career in the loft of an old barn. Parts
of the first steamboat ever run in America were set up in the vestry of
an old church in Philadelphia by Fitch. McCormick began to make his
famous reaper in an old grist-mill. The first model dry-dock was made in
an attic. Clark, the founder of Clark University of Worcester, Mass.,
began his great fortune by making toy wagons in a horse-shed.

Opportunities? They crowd around us. Forces of nature plead to be used
in the service of man, as lightning for ages tried to attract his
attention to electricity, which would do his drudgery and leave him to
develop the God-given powers within him.

There is power lying