Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line
of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will
succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times
worse than nothing.
--SYDNEY SMITH.

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom,
and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.
--BEECHER.

I am glad to think
I am not bound to make the world go round;
But only to discover and to do,
With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints.
--JEAN INGELOW.

"Do that which is assigned you," says Emerson, "and you cannot hope too
much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of
the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all
these."

"I felt that I was in the world to do something, and thought I must,"
said Whittier, thus giving the secret of his great power. It is the man
who must enter law, literature, medicine, the ministry, or any other of
the overstocked professions, who will succeed. His certain call--that
is, his love for it, and his fidelity to it--are the imperious factors
of his career. If a man enters a profession simply because his
grandfather made a great name in it, or his mother wants him to, with no
love or adaptability for it, it were far better for him to be a day
laborer. In the humbler work, his intelligence may make him a leader; in
the other career he might do as much harm as a boulder rolled from its
place upon a railroad track, a menace to the next express.

Lowell said: "It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not,
that has strewn history with so many broken purposes, and lives left in
the rough."

"The age has no aversion to preaching as such," said Phillips Brooks,
"it may not listen to your preaching." But though it may not listen to
your preaching, it will wear your boots, or buy your flour, or see stars
through your telescope. It has a use for every person, and it is his
business to find out what that use is.

The following advertisement appeared several times in a paper without
bringing a letter:

"WANTED.--Situation by a Practical Printer, who is competent to
take charge of any department in a printing and publishing
house. Would accept a professorship in any of the academies.
Has no objection to teach ornamental pai