If each one did the best he knew, he
would be on the highway to greater knowledge, and therefore still better
action. The redemption of the world is waiting only for each man to
"lend a hand."
It does not matter if the greatest thing for you to do be not in itself
great. The best preparation for greatness comes in doing faithfully the
little things that lie nearest. The nearest is the greatest in most
human lives.
Even washing one's own face may be the greatest present duty. The
ascetics of the past, who scorned cleanliness in the search for
godliness, became, sometimes, neither clean nor holy. For want of a
clean face they lost their souls.
It was Agassiz's strength that he knew the value of today. Never were
such bright skies as arched above him; nowhere else were such charming
associates, such budding students, such secrets of nature fresh to his
hand. His was the buoyant strength of the man who can look the stars in
the face because he does his part in the Universe as well as they do
theirs. It is the fresh, unspoiled confidence of the natural man, who
finds the world a world of action and joy, and time all too short for
the fulness of life which it demands. When Agassiz died, "the best
friend that ever student had," the students of Harvard "laid a wreath of
laurel on his bier, and their manly voices sang a requiem, for he had
been a student all his life long, and when he died he was younger than
any of them."
Optimism in life is a good working hypothesis, if by optimism we mean
the open-eyed faith that force exerted is never lost.
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