At all cost keep your capacity for human sympathy.

The sharp, hard processes of our strictly business civilization tend to regulate even our sympathies into a system.  It is as if we should say each day, “I have time to-day for five minutes of human sympathy,” and promptly push the button of our stop-watch when the second-hand shows that the time has expired.  Burns is the best corrective of this that I know—­the best, that is, outside of the Bible itself.

Indeed the more one thinks about it the clearer it is that we might throw away all other books but the Bible, and still have all our mental and moral needs ministered to by those who through all time have thought and felt most highly; for the Bible is the record of the loftiest of all human expression, not to mention its divine origin.

Put your Bible, your Shakespeare, your Burns in your bundle when you go for a journey, and you are intellectually and spiritually equipped.

Let a man have the courage of his thought—­I repeat it.  Courage is where we fail, not intellect.  We hear much about intellect, about “brains,” as the rather coarse expression is.  It is not that which is needed; it is courage.

Enter into conversation the next time you are at the club, or in a hotel, or restaurant, or wherever you meet men in intellectual hospitality, on almost any subject you may choose, you will be amazed at the information, the original thought, the keen analysis, even the constructive ideas of most of the men there.

One of the most fertile minds I have ever known is nothing but an unsuccessful lawyer in a country town; yet his intellect is as tropical, and as accurate, too, as was Napoleon’s, or Gould’s.

How is it that all these people do not achieve the successes to which their mere thinking entitles them?  I say, to which their mere thinking entitles them, because—­I say it again—­if you will put them beside the great masters of affairs you will find that they have as many ideas as have these captains of business.  My young friend, it is simply because they have not courage and constancy.  Long ago I catalogued the qualities that make up character, in relative importance, as follows: 

First:  Sincerity; fidelity, the ability to be true—­true to friends, true to ideas, true to ideals, true to your task, true to the truth Who shall deny that the martyrs Nero burned did not experience joys in the consuming flame more delicate and sweet than ever thrilled epicure or lover?

Second (and well-nigh first):  Courage—­the godlike quality that dreads not; the unanalyzable thing in man that makes him execute his conception—­no matter how insane or absurd it may appear to others—­if it appears rational to him, and then stride ahead to his next great deed, regardless of the gossips.

Third:  Reserve—­the power to hold one’s forces in check, as a general disposes his army in an engagement on which the fate of an empire or of the world may depend.  This power of reserve involves silence.  Talk all you please, but keep your large conceptions to yourself till the hour to strike arrives, and then strike with all your might.