Ralph Albert Parlette

“ To continue to be the Mississippi. If he should stop and stagnate, he would not be the Mississippi river, he would become a stagnant, poisonous pond.
As long as people keep on going south, they keep on living. When they stop and stagnate, they die.
That is why I am making it the slogan of my life—GO ON SOUTH AND GROW GREATER! I hope I can make you remember that and say it over each day. I wish I could write it over the pulpits, over the schoolrooms, over the business houses and homes—GO ON SOUTH AND GROW GREATER. For this is life, and there is no other. This is education—and religion. ”

“ We must be learning new things and discovering new joys in our daily routine or we become unhappy. If we go on doing just the same things in the same way day after day, thinking the same thoughts, our eyes glued to precedents—just turning round and round in our places and not growing any, pretty soon we become mere machines. We wear smaller. The joy and juice go out of our lives. We shrivel and rattle.
The success, joy and glory of life are in learning, growing, going forward and upward. That is the only way to hold our place. ”

“ The Augsberg Teacher, a Magazine for Teachers, says: "In The Big Business of Life we have the practical philosophy that it is everyone's business to abolish work and turn this world into a playground. Who will not confess that many mortals take their work too seriously, and that to them it is a joyless, cheerless thing? To be able to find happiness, and to find it when we are bending to our duties is to possess the secret of living to the full. And happiness is to be sought within, and not among the things that lie at our feet. ”

“ WE go up as we grow great. That is, we go up as we grow up. But so many are trying to grow great on the outside without growing great on the inside. They rattle on the inside!
They fool themselves, but nobody else.
There is only one greatness—inside greatness. All outside greatness is merely an incidental reflection of the inside.
Greatness is not measured in any material terms. It is not measured in inches, dollars, acres, votes, hurrahs, or by any other of the world's yardsticks or barometers.
Greatness is measured in spiritual terms. It is education. It is life expansion. ”

“ There follow the days and long years when he pulls on the oar under the lash. Day after day he pulls on the oar. Day after day he writhes under the sting of the lash. Years of the cruel injustice pass. Ben Hur is the helpless victim of a mocking fate.
That seems to be your life and my life. In the kitchen or the office, or wherever we work we seem so often like slaves bound to the oar and pulling under the sting of the lash of necessity. Life seems one futureless round of drudgery. We wonder why. We often look across the street and see somebody who lives a happier life. ”

“ In other words, all the people of the world are in the great barrel of life. That barrel is shaking all the time. Every community is shaking, every place is shaking. The offices, the shops, the stores, the schools, the pulpits, the homes—every place where we live or work is shaking. ”

“ Not for blessing nor cursing, not for popularity nor for selfish ends, not for anything outside, but for the happiness that comes from within.
The Mississippi blesses the valley every day as he goes on south and overcomes. But the valley does not bless the river in return. The valley throws its junk back upon the river. The valley pours its foul, muddy, poisonous streams back upon the Mississippi to defile him. The Mississippi makes St. Paul and Minneapolis about all the prosperity they have, gives them power to turn their mills. ”

“ Each day as I go up the mountain I get a larger vision. The miles that seem so great down in the valley, seem so small as I look down upon them from higher up. Each day as I look back I see more clearly the plan of a human life. The rocks, the curves and the struggles fit into a divine engineering plan to soften the steepness of the ascent. The bumps are lifts. The things that seem so important down in the smudgy, stormswept valley, seem so unimportant as we go higher up the mountain to more important things.
Today I look back to the bump that sent me up Mount Lowe. ”

“ That is the true happiness of life—discovering Truth. We read things in a book and have a hazy idea of them. We hear the preacher utter truths and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not excited. Truth never excites—it is falsehood that excites—until we discover it in our lives. ”

“ Purify your life and go on south all sweet again. We forget what we ought to remember and remember what we ought to forget. We need schools of memory, but we need schools of forgettery, even more.
As you go on south and bless your valley, do you notice the valley does not bless you very much? Have you sadly noted that the people you help the most often are the least grateful in return? ”

“ The Lure of the City
Do you ever get lonely in a city? How few men and women there. A jam of people, most of them imitations—most of them trying to look like they get more salary. Poor, hungry, doped butterflies of the bright lights,—hopers, suckers and straphangers! Down the great white way they go chasing amusement to find happiness. They must be amused every moment, even when they eat, or they will have to be alone with their empty lives. ”

“ Of course, you can be happy as a child. A boy can be happy with fuzz on his upper lip, but he'll be happier when his lip feels more like mine like a piece of sandpaper. There are chapters of happiness undreamed of in his philosophy.
A child can be full of happiness and only hold a pint. But afterwhile the same child will hold a quart.
I think I hold a gallon now. And I see people in the audience who must hold a barrel! Go on south. Of course, I do not mean circumference. But every year we go south increases our capacity for joy. Our life is one continual unfolding as we go south. ”

“ We go up from unhappiness to happiness.
We go up from weakness to strength.
We go up from low ideals to high ideals.
We go up from little vision to greater vision.
We go up from foolishness to wisdom.
We go up from fear to faith.
We go up from ignorance to understanding.
We go up by our own personal efforts. We go up by our own service, sacrifice, struggle and overcoming. We push out our own skyline. We rise above our own obstacles. We learn to see, hear, hold and understand. ”

“ Becoming great is overcoming our selfishness and fear. He that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for the advancement of the kingdom of happiness on earth shall find it great and glorified.
Our greatness therefore does not depend upon how much we give or upon what we do, whether peeling potatoes or ruling a nation, but upon the percentage of our output to our resources. ”

“ O UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS, we learn to love you more with each passing year. We learn that you are cruel only to be kind. We learn that you are saving us from ourselves. But O, how most of us must be bumped to see this! ”

“ But remember there is little virtue in work unless it is getting us somewhere. Just work that gets us three meals a day and a place to lie down to sleep, then another day of the same grind, then a year of it and years following until our machine is worn out and on the junkpile, means little. "One day nearer home" for such a worker means one day nearer the scrapheap.
Such a worker is like the packhorse who goes forward to keep ahead of the whip. Such a worker is the horse we used to have hitched to the sorghum mill. ”

“ We must go right back to our old place—into our kitchen or our workshop or our office and take the first step, solve the problem nearest at hand. We must make our old work luminous with a new devotion. We must battle up over every inch. And as fast as we solve and dissolve the difficulties and turn our burdens into blessings, we find love, the universal solvent, shining out of our lives. We find our spiritual influences going upward. ”

“ But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical realities. ”

“ Getting greatness on the outside is little business. Much of it mighty little.
Everybody's privilege and duty is to become great. And the joy of it is that the first step is always nearest at hand. We do not have to go off to New York or Chicago or go chasing around the world to become great. It is a great stairway that leads from where our feet are now upward for an infinite number of steps. ”

“ He has no place to put a lecture. I am not saying that he should attend my lecture, but I am grieving at what underlies his remark. He does not want to think. He wants to follow his nose around. Other people generally lead his nose. The man who will not make the effort to think is the great menace to the nation. The crowd that drifts and lives for amusement is the crowd that finds itself back near the caboose, and as the train of progress leaves them, they wail, they "never had no chanct." ”

“ Life is a constant survival of the fittest.
The same law that shakes the little ones down and the big ones up in that can is shaking every person to the place he fits in the barrel of life. It is sending small people down and great people up.
And do you not see that we are very foolish when we want to be lifted up to some big place, or when we want some big person to be put down to some little place? We are foolishly trying to overturn the eternal law of life.
We shake right back to the places our size determines. We must get ready for places before we can get them and keep them. ”

“ I do not know all the great people who may come and stand upon this floor. But I do know that the one who made the floor—and the one who sweeps it—is just as great as anybody in the world who may come and stand upon it, if each be doing his work with the same love, faithfulness and capability. ”

“ Father and mother cannot buy their children education. All they can do is to buy them some tools, perhaps, and open the gate and say, "Sic 'em, Tige!" The children must get it themselves.
A father and mother might as well say, "We will buy our children the strength we have earned in our arms and the wisdom we have acquired in a life of struggle." ”

“ The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path, I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and God forever in His heavens. ”

“ And so as our problems disappear and our life currents set upward, the world is drawn toward us with its problems. We find our kitchen or workshop or office becoming a new throne of power. We find the world around us rising up to call us blessed. ”

“ Each person here is a different audience, reading a different page in the Book of Human Experience. Each has a different fight to make and a different burden to carry. Each one of us has more trouble than anybody else! ”

“ Had Ben Hur never pulled on the oar, he never could have won the chariot race.
Sooner or later you and I are to learn that Providence makes no mistakes in the bookkeeping. As we pull on the oar, so often lashed by grim necessity, every honest effort is laid up at compound interest in the bank account of strength. Sooner or later the time comes when we need every ounce. Sooner or later our chariot race is on—when we win the victory, strike the deciding blow, stand while those around us fall—and it is won with the forearms earned in the galleys of life by pulling on the oar. ”

“ The preacher, the teacher—everyone who gets put on the retired list, retires himself. He quits going on south.
The most wonderful person in the world is the one who has lived years and years on earth and has perhaps gotten gray on the outside, but has kept young and fresh on the inside. Put that person in the pulpit, in the schoolroom, in the office, behind the ticket-window or on the bench—or under the hod—and you find the whole world going to that person for direction, advice, vision, help, sympathy, love. ”

“ Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can alone solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a higher vision. ”

“ And the individual, the community, the nation that goes on relaxing without contracting—without struggling and overcoming—is degenerating.
The more you study your muscles, the more you learn that while one muscle is relaxing another is contracting. So you must learn that your real relaxation, vacation and amusement, are merely changing over to contracting another set of muscles. ”