Demonstrating Diligence
Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed. --Robert Cavett

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. --Susan Ertz, author (1894-1985)

Days are expensive. When you spend a day, you have one less day to spend. So make sure you spend each one wisely. --E. James Rohn

When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets. --Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't believe people die from hard work. They die from stress and worry and fear -- the negative emotions. Those are the killers, not hard work. The fact is, in our society today, most people don't understand what hard work is all about. --A. L. Williams

Live one day at a time. You can plan for tomorrow and hope for the future, but don't live in it. Live this day well, and tomorrow's strength will come tomorrow. --Charles W. Shedd

Just for today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime. --Anonymous

We all need lots of powerful long-range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles. --Jim Rohn

I awaken in the morning with confidence, rejoicing in whatever work is given me to do. Whatever that work is, I do it, not in order to earn a living or in a sense of performing an onerous duty; but, with joy and gladness, I let it unfold as the activity of God expressing through me. --Joel S. Goldsmith

The life of a true servant can only be lived "one day at a time." --Joyce Lock

If we are willing to take hours on end to learn to play a piano, or operate a computer, or fly an airplane, it is sheer nonsense for us to imagine that we can learn the high art of getting guidance through communion with the Lord without being willing to set aside time for it. It is no accident that the Bible speaks of prayer as a form of waiting on God. --Paul Rees

Your Best Foot Forward
Which sounds longer to you -- 569,400 hours, or 65 years? They are exactly the same in length of time.

The average man spends his first 18 years -- 157,000 hours -- getting an education. That leaves him 412,000 hours from 18 to 65. Eight hours of every day are spent in sleeping; eight hours in eating and recreation. So there is left 8 hours to work in each day.

One-third of 412,000 hours is 134,000 hours -- the number of hours a man has to work between the age of 18 and 65. Expressed in hours it doesn’t seem a very long time, does it?

Now I am not recommending that you tick off the hours that you worked -- 134,000, 133,999, 133,998, etc. -- but I do suggest that whatever you do, you do it with all you have in you.

If you are sleeping, sleep well. If you are playing, play well. If you are working, give the best that is in you, remembering that in the last analysis the real satisfactions in life come not from money and things, but from the realization of a job well done. Therein lies the difference between the journeyman worker and a real craftsman.

Work is doing what you now enjoy for the sake of a future which you clearly see and desire. Drudgery is doing under strain what you don’t now enjoy and for no end that you can now appreciate. --Richard C. Cabot

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not. --Charles Kingsley

Leisure is a beautiful garment, but it will not do for constant wear.

Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth. --J. Andrews

The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between men - between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant -- is energy, invincible determination -- a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities, will make a two-legged creature a man without it. There are hindrances without and within, but the outer hindrances could effect nothing if there were no inner surrender to them. Fear of opinion, timidity, dread of change, love of ease, indolence, unfaithfulness, are the great hindrances. --Sam Jones

Little By Little
No great work is ever done in a hurry. To develop a great scientific discovery, to paint a great picture, to write an immortal poem, to become a minister or a famous general -- to do anything great requires time, patience, and persevrance. These things are done by degrees, “little by little.” Milton did not write “Paradise Lost” at a sitting, nor did Shakespeare compose “Hamlet” in a day. The greatest writers must begin with the alphabet, the most famous musicians once picked out their notes laboriously; a child must learn to draw a straight line before he can develop into a Titian or a Michael Angelo. -W. J. Wilmont Buxton

Perseverance gives power to weakness, and opens to poverty the world’s wealth. It spreads fertility over the barren landscape, and bids the choicest flowers and fruits spring up and flourish the desert abode of thorns and briars. --S. G. Goodrich

Let it be remembered that “steadfast application to a fixed aim” is the law of a well-spent life. When Giardini was asked how long it would take to learn the violin, he replied, “Twelve hours a day for twenty years together.” Alas, to many of us think to play our fiddles by a species of inspiration!

The Leotards and Blondins whose gymnastic achievements attract such admiring crowds - what labor must they have undergone; what “painful diligence” must they have exhibited! The same energy, the same adherence to a settled purpose, might assuredly have made them benefactors of mankind, had they been animated by a nobler impulse.

Little Strokes
Jacob Riis, in his drive against slums, never allowed a chance to pass of telling the people of New York what they were harboring. But it took a lot of telling, and he sometimes grew discouraged. “But,” he said, “when nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps 100 times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.

Efficiency
“Nothing,” said Carlyle, “is more terrible than activity without insight.”

The tragedy of life is not hardship, labor, suffering; but meaninglessness, emptiness, effort without objective. The fever-racked man who aimlessly passes through the motions of his accustomed daily conduct is a pitiable object. How much more so those whose daily conduct is merely the expression of the fever of life.

Only the man whose activity is directed by a greater purpose can be fundamentally happy. Life easily degenerates into the mere dance of death unless it be intelligently directed. Behind the expenditure of the precious energy of life there must be the highest degree of wisdom. Otherwise that energy which can never be recaptured is wasted.

Whatever your hands find to do, that do with all the might that is in you. That is the lesson of all experience. Face every task with a determinations to conquer its difficulties and never to let them conquer you. No task is too small to be done well. For the man who is worthy, who is fit to perform the deeds of the world, even the greatest, sooner or later the opportunity to do them will come. --G. W. Goethals