During all her poverty she was worth thirty-five hundred dollars, but did not know it.
Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities if we could only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more than diamond bracelets, in power to do good.
In our large eastern cities it has been found that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common everyday wants.

It is a sorry day for a young man who cannot see any opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.

Several Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig gold, and took along a handful of clear pebbles to play checkers with on the voyage.

They discovered after arriving at Sacramento, after they had thrown most of the pebbles away, that they were all diamonds.

They returned to Brazil only to find that the mines had been taken up by others and sold to the government.
The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold for forty-two dollars by the owner, to get money to pay his passage to other mines where he thought he could get rich.
Professor Agassiz told the Harvard students of a farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods and rocks, and concluded to sell out and try some more remunerative business.
He studied coal measures and coal oil deposits, and experimented for a long time.