| "The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market | | | | is more to be feared by the individual and by society |
| -- it depends on two words, industry and frugality; that | | | | than the condition of poverty; it maddens a good man |
| is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best of | | | | to crime and drives a madman to destruction. The |
| both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do; with | | | | condition of poverty is not a normal one and may quite |
| them everything." -- Franklin. | | | | easily be thrown off by any one who has health and |
| As a man chooses his coat for its wearing qualities or | | | | the will of progress. It was Thucydides who said this |
| for the moment's passing whim, so does he choose | | | | about 425 B. C.: |
| his destiny. The responsibility and the result lie with the | | | | "An avowal of poverty is no disgrace to any man; to |
| chooser. Each living person chooses--and each hour | | | | make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful." |
| that passes fixes his choice deeper and deeper in his | | | | Nearly 2,200 years later Oliver Goldsmith said: |
| daily life. | | | | "To be poor, and seem to be poor, is a certain way |
| Wealth is a state of mind or perhaps 'twould be better | | | | never to rise." |
| to say that wealth is created through a state of mind. | | | | So for more than 2,000 years, it has been understood |
| Few people get rich or acquire riches at a single | | | | that the person, who was poor and let it be known, |
| stroke; most people who become rich grow rich, and | | | | and made little or no effort to rise above poverty, was |
| the growth and development of a personal fortune is | | | | largely responsible for his own unhappy condition. |
| sometimes scarcely noted by the busy man or | | | | Poverty and pauperism must not be confused; one |
| woman, who is thus almost unconsciously growing rich. | | | | who has, through misfortune, ill-health or a combination |
| The acquiring of money and property, once begun, is a | | | | of circumstances, become a pauper may have left to |
| simple and easy process; growing rich comes through | | | | him no avenue of escape. The pauper is to be pitied |
| habits that are such fixed parts of one's daily life that, | | | | and to be helped. |
| once on the road to wealth, it would be quite difficult, if | | | | The poor are those people who spend more than |
| not wholly impossible, to stop the growth*.* | | | | they get or at least spend all they get; Bruyere put it |
| "If you live according to what nature requires, you mill | | | | thus--"He is poor whose expenses exceed his |
| never be poor; if according to the notions of men, you | | | | income." If such a condition should obtain long enough, |
| will never be rich. This is especially detrimental to us, | | | | that person would be a pauper; from poverty to |
| that we live, not according to the light of reason, but | | | | pauperism is not a long step; it is only a short slide. |
| after the fashion set by others." | | | | Wealth, ease, comfort and even contentment are |
| These thoughts from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who | | | | within the reach of each one of us, though we all |
| was born in Rome before the year One. It is easy to | | | | travel different roads toward our selected goals. The |
| see that the same things kept people poor in those | | | | paths of some of us lie over mountains where, if we |
| days as in our own time and the principles of living well | | | | have the strength, we may leap from peak to peak of |
| and happily and gradually acquiring wealth have not | | | | success, but the many of us, the great multitude, who |
| changed a whit since the year One. | | | | travel the level plains, must approach success steadily |
| There is no condition into which a man may come that | | | | rod by rod, mile by mile, day by day and year by year. |