... it is a lonely programme. The very virtues you cultivate become walls that inevitably separate you from your kind.... A new danger comes to your soul, and intolerance and impatience with those who are as you have been all but destroy that which you have taken such pains to build up. Not alone are there spiritual barriers between you and the friends that you have, but your business training has made your mind incisive. In the swift rush of business you have no time for small debates and petty dilemmas.

Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

That is the wearisome part of business - there is no peace, no sense of certain, permanent achievement, no stability. The unexpected, and usually the awful, is forever happening.

For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.

Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.