Dear is my friend, but my foe too
Is friendly to my good;
My friend the thing shows I _can_ do,
My foe the thing I should.
--Johann C. F. von Schiller.
How does the soul grow? Not all in a minute;
Now it may lose ground, and now it may win it;
Now it resolves, and again the will faileth;
Now it rejoiceth, and now it bewaileth;
Now its hopes fructify, then they are blighted;
Now it walks sunnily, now gropes benighted;
Fed by discouragements, taught by disaster,
So it goes forward, now slower, now faster;
Till, all the pain past and failure made whole,
It is full grown, and the Lord rules the soul.
--Susan Coolidge.
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel, or reprimand.
'Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!
--Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow-fall in the river,
A moment white--then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm.
--Robert Burns.
I saw a farmer plow his land who never came to sow;
I saw a student filled with truth to practice never go;
In land or mind I never saw the ripened harvest grow.
--Saadi, tr. by James Freeman Clarke.