CHAPTER XV.
WILL-POWER.
In the moral world there is nothing impossible if we can bring a thorough will to do it.
-- W.

HUMBOLDT.
It is firmness that makes the gods on our side.
-- VOLTAIRE.
Stand firm, don't flutter.
-- FRANKLIN.
People do not lack strength they lack will.
-- VICTOR HUGO.
Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance and make a seeming difficulty give way.
-- JEREMY COLLIER.
When a firm, decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom.
-- JOHN FOSTER.
"Do you know," asked Balzac's father, "that in literature a man must be either a king or a beggar ?" "Very well," replied his son, "_I will be a king._" After ten years of struggle with hardship and poverty, he won success as an author.
"Why do you repair that magistrate's bench with such great care ?" asked a bystander of a carpenter who was taking unusual pains.

"Because I wish to make it easy against the time when I come to sit on it myself," replied the other.

He did sit on that bench as a magistrate a few years later.
"_I will be marshal of France and a great general_," exclaimed a young French officer as he paced his room with hands tightly clenched.

He became a successful general and a marshal of France.
"There is so much power in faith," says Bulwer, "even when faith is applied but to things human and earthly, that let a man but be firmly persuaded that he is born to do some day, what at the moment seems impossible, and it is fifty to one but what he does it before he dies." There is about as much chance of idleness and incapacity winning real success, or a high position in life, as there would be in producing a Paradise Lost by shaking up promiscuously the separate words of Webster's Dictionary, and letting them fall at random on the floor.
Fortune smiles upon those who roll up their sleeves and put their shoulders to the wheel; upon men who are not afraid of dreary, dry, irksome drudgery, men of nerve and grit who do not turn aside for dirt and detail.
"Is there one whom difficulties dishearten ?" asked John Hunter.