Invincibility

“ I have either got to overcome the world, or the world is going to overcome me. I have either got to conquer sin in me—or sin about me—and get it under my feet, or it is going to conquer me. A good many people are satisfied with one or two victories, and think that is all. I tell you, my dear friends, we have got to do something more than that. It is a battle all the time. We have this to encourage us: we are assured of victory at the end. ”

“ What though I die upon the field of battle, it will be as brave men die; making thy triumph but an empty one with my never-failing challenge, "Thou hast not vanquished me yet, nor wilt thou ever!" In very truth it will be I who will have gained the victory, thou bitter foe of mine: for until my last faint breath shall have been drawn I shall have refused to own thy power! ”

“ But you take those thirty-two mighty minds, let them concentrate on winning that wonderful battle, greater than any peaceful one yet fought on any water; not excluding that between Mnestheus and Cloanthus, and all their famous triremes—get all that intellect, all that force, all that resistless will-power, and fighting-power incarnate, packed into those dainty, glistening racing-shells—thirty-two men with the racing spirit of thirty-two thousand coiled up in their great brains—and name the winner if you can! ”

“ The myriad vicissitudes of the struggle search out all our weaknesses; test all our powers. Every victory shows a more difficult height to scale, a steeper pinnacle of god-like hardship—that's the reward of victory: it provides the hero with ever-new battle-fields: no rest for him this side the grave. ”

“ The battling, battling, and the steep ascent,
The fight to hold the little gained,
The loss, the doubt, the shaken heart,
The stubborn, groping slow recovery!—
But looking backward toward the dim beginnings,
You that despair,
Hath he not climbed and conquered?
Look backward and all's Victory!
What coward looks forward and foresees defeat? ”

“ The hosts who perished are evidence of the completeness of the triumph; and the completeness of the triumph is the measure of merit, and the glory of the conqueror. Our schoolmasters, and the immoral books they so often put into our hands, have inspired us with an affection for heroes; and the hero is more heroic in proportion [96] to the numbers of the slain—add a cypher, not one iota is added to our disapprobation. Four or two figures give us no more sentiment of pain than one figure, while they add marvellously to the grandeur and splendour of the victor. ”

“ They had been carrying so much for so long that some thought they were still fighting on, when as a matter of fact, they had won through with the triumph of brave souls that never know when they are whipped, and to whom the thrill of victory is so rare, or unknown, that it comes unsuspected, unlooked for—as an exuberance of immeasurable joy. ”

“ Your hopes may perish upon the very verge of victory: what soldier of wisdom ever left the field without the spoils of a vanquished foe? "Yea, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that hath loved us." Success, therefore, is certain. "The victory is the Lord's, and he giveth it to whomsoever it pleaseth him." Let the enemy boast, and rage, and threaten! "Who hath hardened himself against the Lord and prospered?" The sea shall drown them; the earth shall devour them; the fire of heaven shall consume them; the stars in their courses shall fight against them ”

“ He may fail in his career, but, if successful, his success will be great, divine. It will be heavenly, if he must die, to fall on the field of battle amid the roar of artillery, and the clash of arms. ”

“ For it has never been with us, "Come, see, and conquer," as if victory were an easy thing and a common. We have known what it is to toil for the salvation of some little life, and we have known the bitterness of defeat. ”

“ At that very moment when you think that victory lies within your grasp, it will escape you—there will be something of which you have not thought—a trifle—a grain of sand which I shall have put in the right place, unknown to you. ”

“ Victors over daily wrongs:
Awful victors, they misguide
Whom they will destroy,
And their coming triumph hide
In our downfall, or our joy:
They reach no term, they never sleep,
In equal strength through space abide ”

“ Ours is the blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, they are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves. ”

“ Though we do ever so valiantly, the success must be attributed entirely to him; for he it is that shall tread down our enemies, and not we ourselves. All our victories, as well as our valour, are from him, and therefore at his feet all our crown must be cast. ”

“ Like an assailant who should succeed in throwing his standard into the strong central keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his way thereto with assured victory in his eyes of hope, so man with the vision of his soul prognosticates his final triumph. ”

“ I always think of three words to characterize the battle. Will, endurance, and drive: the will to win, the endurance which could bear the misery necessary to win, and the drive which by repeated attacks would break the enemy's will. ”

“ To face it confidently in one’s own strength is gravest folly. There is only one possibility of victory. In that hour of peril, when eternal destinies are at stake, let one feel his own weakness, and fall helplessly at the feet of Christ, and call with all the earnestness and pathos of his frightened soul, “Lord, save, or I perish!” and victory shall fill his heart with joy and crown his brow with the light of heaven. ”

“ You tell me that the true victory comes when the fight is won: that our foe is never so noble nor so dangerous as when she is fallen, that the crowning triumph is that we celebrate over our conquering selves. ”

“ What I have never done — fleeing from the battle — well, will that happen today? For fear of defeat shall I retreat from the fight? Defeat is the ornament the hero adorns himself with. What, to acknowledge defeat without fighting! ”

“ If you want to win out (and who does not?) you must enter the ring—the arena of life—with all the power you can muster, in superb health, at the top of your condition, capable of putting up your biggest fight. You can do this and come out with your flag flying if you are good to yourself, if you keep fit. But if you allow all sorts of leaks of power to drain away your energy, your brain force, your will power, you will be in no condition to make the fight of your life. ”

“ I want you to recognize that you have been splendidly victorious—all through: because you are splendid yourself. It's a victory that's costing us all the happiness out of life, perhaps, but it oughtn't to leave you any room for self-reproach. ”

“ No victory so glorious to any man as that when he rises over his dead self and can shout with unwavering confidence, I WILL. That young man's battle was furious and a strain on body and soul; he kept saying over and over again, "I will solve that riddle." ”

“ I see behind it the world's battlefields—'way back from the first I see them all, and I see that the thing which has shaped the world is not the success or failure of individual battles one-half so much as it is this wresting of victory from defeat by simply breathing victory even after the sword has been broken in the hand. ”

“ I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen—"hush!—this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else"—and then I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I raised my head—"or else, oh heavens! it is victory that is final, victory that swallows up all strife." ”

“ Who fell in the great victory.
I find them in the garden, for
There's many here about;
And often when I go to plough,
The ploughshare turns them out;
For many thousand men, said he,
Were slain in the great victory. ”

“ The godly know that triumph will at last be theirs. They know also that they cannot obtain it without a victory, nor obtain a victory without fighting, nor a fight without foes and hard conflict with them. ”

“ Who, then, is the invincible man? ”

“ Putting fear and hesitancy far from us, let us gird ourselves with the joyful strength of assured victory, striking as those who know that conquest is bound to their standard, and who through all the dust of the field see the fair vision of the final triumph. ”

“ All unafraid of failure, to venture forth to fight,
Yet never for the victory's sake to turn away from right.
Ten thousand times the victor is he who fails to win,
Who could have worn the conqueror's crown by stooping low in sin;
Ten thousand times the braver is he who turns away
And scorns to crush a weaker man that he may rule the day. ”

“ And thus it is true, in a deeper sense, that many a triumph crushes and extinguishes all that is noblest in him who has won it. Doubtless, failure and defeat are bitter, but hardest of all to bear are not our losses but our victories.—Bishop Potter, Scribner’s Magazine. ”

“ If you win, your men have their reward for their wounds and suffering, and those who have fallen have not died in vain. If you fail, your men feel that all their effort has been wasted. Do not fail. Go through! ”

“ There is plenty of room, there, for a different sounding of the phrase: for making it ring of challenge, and strife, and victory—also of honourable defeat, after lusty strokes have been dealt and taken: the next best thing to a win—sometimes even a better thing. ”

“ And e'en in hearts depraved to sin
Some sudden, gracious influence,
May give the long-lost good again,
And wake within the dormant sense
And love of good;—for mortal men,
So but thou strive, thou soon shalt see
Defeat itself is victory. ”

“ Having been denied victory on the field of battle, if that Gott who was their Feste Burg does not desert them, they will now win a greater victory—they will show the world that they can conquer themselves and convert defeat into victory. They are without shame and without modesty. ”

“ That is, obtain victory in every place; the closet, at the family altar, in the prayer meeting, when the word of God is preached, among the children, in the kitchen, parlor, trade and commerce, when laboring to bring poor sinners to Zion, paying your vows unto the Lord, helping on the gospel as God has prospered you with means, and in every place and under all circumstances, let victory be written upon your banner. It is shameful to suffer defeat. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” How sickening to simply play fight and never know what a square victory means. ”

“ It’s the casting aside of temptation by the sheer strength of the will power that makes the struggle easier, the way grow brighter, and the victories grander. If God would allow such a condition once, we, in our weakness, might ask again and again and instead of growing stronger we would grow weaker. It is the heroic fighter who has won his laurels when the bullets of evil whizzed all around him that you like to go up to and pin the medal on. ”

“ The danger is lest any progress made, any victory won, should lead to that self-confidence which can only end in disaster. Success is often a discipline far more fatal in its results than failure.
We celebrate to-day the grandest victory the world has ever known: a victory which sprang out of the depths of an apparently complete defeat. ”

“ It is not so correct to say that we shall be victorious as that we are so. When we will in unison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, in some sort, those of ours. What He has willed is virtually done. ”

“ It is defeat that turns bone to flint, and gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible, and formed those heroic natures that are now in ascendancy in the world. Do not, then, be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.—Henry Ward Beecher. ”

“ He is victorious in them all. But as the crown of success is placed upon his temples, he discovers for the first time that he has had for his antagonist the three greatest forces of nature. He raced with thought, he wrestled with old age, he drank the sea. ”

“ Sometimes I think all this is the almost inevitable result of something inherently weak but with one clear power: that of visualizing or perceiving strength in other things and so, by contrast, its own weakness; and, by reflex action merely, attempting to salve itself against its own ineffectiveness by imagining itself to be that which it may never be: a victor, a Colossus bestriding the world, an undying potentate, ruling forever, and so gaining strength to go on. ”

“ He could throw in his lot with a cause, and ardently strive for the victory, and yet know all the while that there were flaws in that same cause, and admit with sorrow, yet firm truthfulness, that in this world no cause is ever altogether pure, altogether just. ”

“ What a vexing paradox is this young man who sits and glowers and gnaws his lips in the very moment of his victory, while I, his victim, tranquil and happy in defeat, sit calmly telling my thoughts like holy beads to salve my new-born soul. ”

“ Yet still, so far as it is possible, every man sighs for a still higher victory over himself: a victory not tainted by bribes, and won from no impulses but those inspired by his own higher nature, and his own mysterious force of will; powers that in no man were fully developed. ”

“ The popular lore of all nations testifies that duplicity and cunning, together with bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than courage, as heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was the great affair of life. ”