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Cecil’s dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, “The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.”

Samuel Smiles

It is energy – the central element of which is will – that produces the miracle that is enthusiasm in all ages. Everywhere it is what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action.
SAMUEL SMILES

Action Character Element Energy Force Greatness Miracle Production
Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,–teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world’s good.
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Action Goodness Greatness World
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But all play and no work makes him something worse.
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Play Work Worst
National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
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Industry National Progress Selfish
Make good thy standing place, and move the world.
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Goodness Move Place Stand World
The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
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Distance Excellence Industrial Object Principle
It is not ease, but effort-not facility, but difficulty, makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved.
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Achievement Decision Difficult Effort Station
Energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details and caries him onward and upward to every station in life.
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Detail Energy Force Life Man Station
With will one can do anything.
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Oneself Willing
The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.
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Character Greatness Himself Leadership
The Romans rightly employed the same word (virtus) to designate courage, which is, in a physical sense, what the other is in a moral; the highest virtue of all being victory over ourselves.
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Courage Ourselves Roman Virtue Word
The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.
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Difficult Greatness Man Service
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
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Drink Industry Law Sober
Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty.
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Life Responsibility Value
Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.
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Aspiration Himself Man Rise
There are many counterfeits of character, but the genuine article is difficult to be mistaken.
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Article Character Difficult Mistake

Cecil’s dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, “The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.”

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Cecil’s dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, “The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.”

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