Orison Swett Marden：Pushing to the Front, Excerpt 402

If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and late all my life, and I know I shall come across something--either gold, silver, or at least iron." I say most emphatically, no. Would an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver and gold? The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find never finds anything. If we look for nothing in particular, we find just that and no more. We find what we seek with all our heart. The bee is not the only insect that visits the flower, but it is the only one that carries honey away. It matters not how rich the materials we have gleaned from the years of our study and toil in youth, if we go out into life with no well-defined idea of our future work, there is no happy conjunction of circumstances that will arrange them into an imposing structure, and give it magnificent proportions.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21291
Locator：Excerpt 402 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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