Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize her.  “Vigilance in watching opportunity,” said Phelps, “tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement—­these are the martial virtues which must command success.”  “The best men,” remarked Chapin, “are not those who have waited for chances, but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor.”

Is it not possible to classify successes and failures by their various degrees of will-power?  A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns neither to the right nor to the left, though a paradise tempt him, who keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of success.

“Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of Ophir.  But shall it therefore rot in the harbor?  No!  Give its sails to the wind!”

CONSCIOUS POWER.

“Conscious power,” says Melles, “exists within the mind of every one.  Sometimes its existence is unrealized, but it is there.  It is there to be developed and brought forth, like the culture of that obstinate but beautiful flower, the orchid.  To allow it to remain dormant is to place one’s self in obscurity, to trample on one’s ambition, to smother one’s faculties.  To develop it is to individualize all that is best within you, and give it to the world.  It is by an absolute knowledge of yourself, the proper estimate of your own value.”

“There is hardly a reader,” says an experienced educator, “who will not be able to recall the early life of at least one young man whose childhood was spent in poverty, and who, in boyhood, expressed a firm desire to secure a higher education.  If, a little later, that desire became a declared resolve, soon the avenues opened to that end.  That desire and resolve created an atmosphere which attracted the forces necessary to the attainment of the purpose.  Many of these young men will tell us that, as long as they were hoping and striving and longing, mountains of difficulty rose before them; but that when they fashioned their hopes into fixed purposes aid came unsought to help them on the way.”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF?

The man without self-reliance and an iron will is the plaything of chance, the puppet of his environment, the slave of circumstances.  Are not doubts the greatest of enemies?  If you would succeed up to the limit of your possibilities, must you not constantly hold to the belief that you are success-organized, and that you will be successful, no matter what opposes?  You are never to allow a shadow of doubt to enter your mind that the Creator intended you to win in life’s battle.  Regard every suggestion that your life may be a failure, that you are not made like those who succeed, and that success is not for you, as a traitor, and expel it from your mind as you would a thief from your house.