Six Years of Blogging!

The Blog from the Core is six years old today.

To celebrate the occasion, here are extracts from a unique "motivational" work, The University of Hard Knocks by Ralph Parlette, 1914 (page numbers in brackets).

Real living is conscious effort to go upward to larger life. If you are making no effort in your life, if you are moving in the line of least resistance, depend upon it you are going downward. [10]

Did you ever notice how long you have to see most things before you see them? [26]

But thank God, you and I are not helpless victims of blind fate. We are not creatures of chance. We have it in our hands to decide our destiny as we grow or refuse to grow. [31]

The very routine of life must every day flash a new attractiveness. 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. [37]

We must get ready for things before we get them. All life is preparation for greater things. [39f]

When you get to the place where you can stand aside and "see yourself go by" — when you can keep still and see every fibre of you and your work mercilessly dissected, shake hands with yourself and rejoice, for the kingdom of success is yours. [41f]

You can only help a man to help himself. Help him to grow. You cannot help many people, for there are not many people willing to be helped on the inside. Not many willing to grow up. [42]

Today you and I have things we couldn't have yesterday. We just wanted them yesterday. O, how we wanted them! But a cruel fate would not let us have them. Today we have them. They come to us as naturally today, and we see it is because we have grown ready for them.... Today you and I want things beyond our reach. O, how we want them! But a cruel fate will not let us have them. Do you not see that "cruel fate" is our own smallness and unreadiness? As we grow greater we have greater things. We have today all we can stand today. More would wreck us. [46]

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.... 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. We may become very great, very educated, rise very high, and yet not leave our kitchen or blacksmith shop. We take the kitchen or blacksmith shop right up with us! We make it a great kitchen or great blacksmith shop. It becomes our throne-room! Come, let us grow greater. There is a throne for each of us. [47f]

The world says that to get greatness means to get great things. So the world is in the business of getting — getting great fortunes, great lands, great titles, great applause, great fame, and folderol. Afterwhile the poor old world hears the empty rattle of the inside, and wails, "All is vanity. I find no pleasure in them. Life is a failure." All outside life is a failure. Real life is in being things on the inside, not in getting things on the outside. [48]

This is the Big Business of life — going up, getting educated, getting greatness on the inside. 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. We must take the first step now. Most of us want to take the hundredth step or the thousandth step now. We want to make some spectacular stride of a thousand steps at one leap. That is why we fall so hard when we miss our step. [50]

The book and the college suffer at the hands of their friends. They say to the book and the college, "Give us an education." They cannot do that. You cannot get an education from the book and the college any more than you can get to New York by reading a travelers' guide. You cannot get physical education by reading a book on gymnastics. The book and the college show you the way, give you instruction and furnish you finer working tools. But the real education is the journey you make, the strength you develop, the service you perform with these instruments and tools. [64]

You must solve your own problems and carry your own loads to have a strong mind and back. Anybody who does for you regularly what you can do for yourself — anybody who gives you regularly what you can earn for yourself, is robbing you of your birthright. Father and mother can put money in your pocket, ideas in your head and food in your stomach, but you cannot own it save as you digest it — put it into your life. [69]

Happiness is the joy of overcoming. It is the delight of an expanding consciousness. It is the cry of the eagle mounting upward. It is the proof that we are progressing. [72]

With rural delivery, daily papers, telephones, centralized schools, automobiles and good roads, there are no more delightful places in the world to live than in the country or in the small town. They have the city advantages plus sunshine, air and freedom that the crowded cities cannot have. [78]

How long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere. [84]

You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience. [85]

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. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the joy of living. [86]

Find the way your life should go, and then go and keep on going and you'll reach a thousand goals. [129]

Success is not tomorrow or next year. Success is now. Success is not at the end of the journey, for there is no end. [130]

We can protect ourselves fairly well from our enemies, but heaven deliver us from our fool friends. [132]

We are only children in God's great kindergarten, playing with our A-B-C's. I do not utter that as a bit of sentiment, but as the great fundamental of our life. I hope the oldest in years sees that best. I hope he says, "I am just beginning. Just beginning to understand. Just beginning to know about life." [134]

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. [136]

The fact that we are not buried is no proof that we are alive. Go along the street in almost any town and see the dead ones. There they are decorating the hitching-racks and festooning the storeboxes. There they are blocking traffic at the postoffice and depot. There they are in the hotel warming the chairs and making the guests stand up. There they are — rows of retired farmers who have quit work and moved to town to block improvements and die. But they will never need anything more than burying. For they are dead from the ears up. They have not thought a new thought the past month. Sometimes they sit and think, but generally they just sit. [152]

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. [155]

If the burden were lifted from most of us we would go to wreck. Necessity is the ballast in our life voyage. [159]

You have to shoot many men's eyes out before they can see. You have to crack their heads before they can think, knock them down before they can stand, break their hearts before they can sing, and bankrupt them before they can be rich. [160]

I am under the clouds of trouble today, but the sun is shining! I must go on up the mountain to see it. 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. 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. [165f]

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/26/08 09:25:48 AM
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