Finish line

“ So my feet have been in almost continual training. I have never found a task too hard to undertake nor too tedious to finish, and no one appreciates the truth of the old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' better than I do. ”

“ From running the universe at thirty the man of forty finds himself running with it, paced before, behind, and beside, by other runners and by the very stars in their courses. He has struck the universal gait, a strong steady stride that will carry him to the finish, but not among the medals. ”

“ I mean by that don’t put all your strength into the going; save something for the last thirty yards or so. Then let yourself out! Remember that the hundred-yards is a hustle all the way, but the two-twenty is just a hundred and twenty yards longer and the fellow who tries to win in the first half of the race dies at the finish. Of course, it all comes by trying and learning. Experience brings judgment, and judgment is what a sprinter [256] has to have. ”

“ As the concluding laps of a race are generally marked by increased energy incident to the final spurt—the supreme effort to reach, the end in glory and triumph, as in a powerful drama, interest becomes more intense, and action more concentrated with the approach of the finale, so, in this great undertaking, the fact that the end was looming above the horizon of sight called forth redoubled energies on the part of the people. ”

“ If we can’t get our last turn at bat we’ll have to do the best we can. But I wish you all to keep in mind the scheme I have proposed, and play from the start with the idea of holding them down and keeping close to them, so that we may have a chance at the finish. ”

“ Some have climbed the ladder of progress more rapidly than others, yet each in his own body is progressing step by step.
"The decisions that we make as we gradually climb back towards our goal are a determining factor in the speed of our progress. ”

“ For from our point of view, the Other, the completion that our finite being seeks, is not merely something beyond the present, and is not merely a future experience, but is also inclusive of the very process of the striving itself. For the goal of every finite life is simply the totality whereof this life, in its finitude, is a fragment. When I seek my own goal, I am looking for the whole of myself. ”

“ Think’st thou the end shall fail? Who perseveres
Assuredly shall clasp the ultimate goal;
If ultimate goal there be, for bliss shall roll
Boundless before thy view. I say not fears
Shall cease, that strife shall vanish, or that all
Conjured rhapsodical, dispassionately
Shall swim in peace. Nay, all thy passionate days
Shall reach from peak to peak, trial amid,
Gainsayers athwart, waking Life’s deepest zest.
Yet shall the goal gleam rare before thy gaze ”

“ You stand at the goal, a winner. Does your victory intoxicate, or does it sober you with the realization that you have but opened the way to limitless fields of bigger service ahead? Has success gone to your hands and made them tingle with eagerness to grasp more chances to succeed, or has it gone to your head? ”

“ His great work is, emphatically, for strictness of statement, combined with such comprehensiveness of subjects, for depth and clearness of disquisition, and for splendour of style, one of the most magnificent “Triumphs of Perseverance.”
And is the roll of these triumphs complete? Have the labours of the past pretermitted the possibility of equal victories in the future? Never, while the human mind exists, can the catalogue of its successes be deemed to have found a limit or an end. ”

“ I replied, “that, with every year added to your life, you may, if you will, grow wiser and stronger. You stand, as all young minds, at the bottom of a ladder. The height to which you climb will depend upon your strength and endurance.” ”

“ Is the goal distant, and troubled the road,
And the way long?
And heavy your load?
Then gird up your courage, and say ‘I am strong,’
And keep going.
Is the work weary, and endless the grind
And petty the pay? ”

“ But it should not be forgotten that every attempt, made in the right direction, which comes short of the final result, is but a stepping stone for the next effort, and, viewed as a single round in the great ladder of human ascension, a success—an element without which the final achievement would have been impossible. ”

“ Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and thereby becomes in itself a desirable end. ”

“ That is of course why every work appears to be an outside construction beginning with previous elements; a phase of anticipation followed by a phase of execution, calculation, and art, an effective projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality which aims. ”

“ Firmness and determination were still written there, but certain lines had been added; lines of patience that said louder than words: “I have learned one great lesson; that one may run uphill, but that mountains must be climbed slowly, patiently, circle by circle, till the summit is reached.” ”

“ And thus in art, delicate finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is always given by them. In some places Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Phidias, Perugino, Turner, all finished with the most exquisite care; and the finish they give always leads to the fuller accomplishment of their noble purpose. But lower men than these cannot finish, for it requires consummate knowledge to finish consummately, and then we must take their thoughts as they are able to give them. ”

“ To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. ”

“ A perfect conquest of the measure is not possible in our tongue. For the sake of an occasional success in the velocity, sweep, volume of the line, it seems worth an effort; and, if to some degree serviceable for narrative verse, it is one of the exercises of a writer which readers may be invited to share. ”

“ It is not by sudden achievement that we consummate a long journey. It is step by step and mile by mile over a stony road that brings us to the goal, and it is not by mere resolving that we renounce the old and attain unto the new. ”

“ All those who have not fully attained the goal, and completed their evolution, will have to resume it upon the next chain of globes, and even those who are the failures of the fifth round will be successes in the next chain. ”

“ He would reach what would seem to be the very limit of his endurance, but if he held on, and would not rest, would not yield, this curious new vigor would come to him, this feeling of triumph, as if he had passed the boundary of normal endeavor and had become superhuman. ”

“ Why, work was the beginning and the end of everything. Reaching back to the beginnings of creation, extending clear until the last soul in heaven had passed on and through the training camp of the last hereafter, it was the thing that counted most. ”

“ I have known people to suddenly enter a new line of work, and be fully equipped, with little or no training. So make the statement: “I am fully equipped for the Divine Plan of my life,” and be fearless in grasping opportunities. ”

“ I myself will accompany you on the first stage of your hard road, and will be the eyewitness of your trial race, so that you will start on it with a good courage and so that you know behind you a gentle propelling power, while victory winks from afar. ”

“ By the trail that leads from the depths
Through the swirl of the Winning Score;
So those of you in the way
Hark to the chant we've spun—
"Give us the open road
Till we find our place in the sun." ”

“ In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner contract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation of a man running. ”

“ Can there be progress which is not progression—which does not leave a past from which to start—on which to rest our foot when we spring forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has built by the way side. ”

“ It is the time for the last move, the time for the mopping-up, as you have called it, the time to show the world that you have won what you have won, not by brute passion and blind luck, jut by strength of will and cleanness of mind. ”

“ But experience at any moment shows how I am conscious of my own deeds, of my progress, of my acts of attention, and of my approaches to selfhood in any way, in the form of a discrete series, in which one stage or act of life is followed by the next. The principle of my life, as I come to myself, and, knowing what I want, proceed to do it, is a principle winning novelty through Recurrence. ”

“ If a man running a race should step aside for a moment from the path, or stumble and fall, then get up and go on, I should not think he had proved himself to have been mistaken in believing that he had really set out to run it, and in the right path. ”

“ You are to round the rock by running to the right, and you must keep to the right of the path on returning, so that you won't run into anybody. The first to reach this mark on the return wins the race. ”

“ Thee will observe that it is up hill all the way, extending beyond thy vision, and that the road is slippery and seemingly impossible to climb, typifying the pathway over which struggling 375genius is forced to go, slipping here and there, oftentimes stumbling, until it plumes its wings for bolder flight, and by determined effort and perseverance wins the goal. ”

“ But it is monotonous work climbing slowly, hour after hour, in zigzags, with your face to the white wall. You have time to review your past life for years and years, and to think of the future for years ahead. ”

“ The goal is never attained, but the race itself is better than would be rest at the goal. Remember the ranks that are behind you, year after year, in the future. Give them a generous lead. Remember the one pioneer rank in advance of you. ”

“ Let us religiously set apart times and seasons in which to gather up the fruits of action and to experience the reactions which should follow on action. The most valuable of these fruits is just the intensified appreciation of the disparity existing between our achievements and the goal, the clearer vision of the goal, the sublimer and truer conception of it. ”

“ I merely adumbrate the shifting goal, as it may have presented itself to the minds of the men engaged in the movement, that you may know at the outset, in vision, those far-off heights, which they, or some of them, essayed not only themselves to climb, but to make all mankind also to climb. ”

“ Do not make the mistake of thinking that the way will not open because you cannot now see any possible means of achieving that for which you long. The very intensity of your longing for a certain career, to do a certain thing, is the best evidence that you have the ability to match it, and that this ability was given you for a purpose, even to play a divine, a magnificent part in the great universal plan. The longing is merely the forerunner of achievement. It is the seed that will germinate if nurtured by effort. ”

“ The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced—reinforced even immensely—the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in life were the matter. ”

“ We linger long at the table over my favorite madeira, and we talk of the old days, the old contests, and the old boys, grown now to be stout merchants, lawyers, and I know not what. Some of them have lads who will bring new honor to names already famous on track and field, and some, alas! have been beaten out by that famous runner and certain final winner, old Death himself. ”

“ It is victory after victory with the soldier, lesson after lesson with the scholar, blow after blow with the laborer, crop after crop with the farmer, picture after picture with the painter, and mile after mile with the traveler, that secures what all so much desire—Success. ”

“ In short, in life, as in a foot-ball game, the principle to follow is:
Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard! ”

“ But as for me, I made off smartly for the road, my frame tingling, my head high, with never a backward look at the Settlement of suggestive aspect, or at my well-planned future which lay in fragments around it. Life had its jollities, then; life was action, contest, victory! ”

“ Take the race-course: there is the moment when the runner still has half his distance to run, then the moment when he still has a quarter, then when he still has an eighth, and so on in a strictly unending series. ”

“ As the common goal of the successful and unsuccessful, the carved and lettered shaft of the man who had made a name, and the staring blank headboard of the man who had none, climbed the sandy slopes together. ”

“ The process of overcoming is an ascending process, with the eye fixed upon the eternal mountain tops of spiritual supremacy. Give constant recognition to the very highest states of spiritual supremacy that you can possibly discern, and desire all the elements of your being to move perpetually towards those sublime states. You thus produce this ascending process; you will begin to grow out of, to rise out of everything that you have wished to overcome ”

“ Each reel must always advance; it never can go backward. In each succeeding reel of the Long Play we find that the story has just received a set-back in its solution, thru the introduction of a new and formidable obstacle that demands another line of solution from that employed in the preceding reel. ”