t scare
and keep out unworthy competitors.

"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
"If there were no difficulties, there would be no success. In this
necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led
to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."

"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
entering the Birmingham orchestra. "Don't tell me what you like but
what you don't like."

John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
their successes.

"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
discouragements. But if they are properly met, they are not what they
seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances. There is no more
helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."

It is said that but for the disappointments of Dante, Florence would
have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
will be ten of them, and more) would have had no "Divina Commedia" to
hear!

It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote." He was
so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
writing, and had to write on scraps of leather. A rich Spaniard was
asked to help him, but the rich man replied: "Heaven forbid that his
necessities should be relieved, it is his poverty that makes the world
rich."

"A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from
inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements."

"She sings well," said a great musician of a promising but passionless
cantatrice, "but she wants something, and in that something,
everything. If I were single, I would court her, I would marry her; I
would maltreat her; I would break her heart, and in six months she
would be the greatest singer in Europe."

"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
Rossini, "if he had only been well flogged when a boy; but he is
spoiled by the ease with which he composes."

We do our best while fighting