Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 8

Editor’s note

Drive

For days when you want encouragement to start, practise or keep going.

DriveLiterature

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure around 1603–04, and it was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. In Vienna, the strict deputy ruler Angelo has sentenced a young man, Claudio, to death for making his fiancée, Juliet, pregnant before their wedding. Claudio's friend Lucio hurries to a convent to find Claudio's sister Isabella, a novice nun, and urge her to plead with Angelo. When Isabella says she doubts she has any power to help, Lucio answers with these lines. It is telling that such sound advice comes from Lucio, a flippant gossip. Isabella goes, and her pleading drives the rest of the play. The title echoes a line in the Gospel of Matthew: the measure you use on others will be used on you.

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DriveLiterature

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others.

Elizabeth Bennet says this in chapter 31 of Pride and Prejudice (1813), at Rosings, home of Darcy's aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. While she plays the piano, Darcy stands where he can watch her face. She turns and teases him: if he means to frighten her, he will fail, because her courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate her. It is playful, but sums up her character: she will not be cowed by rank or wealth. A few chapters later Darcy proposes, and she turns him down.

Jane AustenRead card

DriveLiterature

Resist much, obey little.

The words come from 'To the States', a poem of just three lines in Leaves of Grass, the book Walt Whitman (1819–1892) first printed at his own expense in 1855 and kept expanding all his life. The next lines give the reason: a people that obeys without question becomes fully enslaved, and once that happens no nation, state or city ever regains its liberty. In the Civil War Whitman nursed wounded soldiers in Washington's hospitals. He saw democracy as something citizens keep alive by using their own judgement.

Walt WhitmanRead card

DriveLiterature

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The sentence comes near the end of 'Circles', an essay in Emerson's Essays: First Series (1841). Its central image is that a larger circle can always be drawn around any circle: every truth, habit or achievement can be outgrown. People grow, Emerson argues, when something carries them beyond themselves and past their usual caution. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), a former minister from Concord, Massachusetts, led Transcendentalism, an American movement that trusted personal intuition and nature over tradition. His essay 'Self-Reliance' appeared in the same book.

Ralph Waldo EmersonRead card

DriveHistory

Let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Lincoln spoke these words on 4 March 1865, as his second term began, with the Civil War nearly won. The speech was about 700 words. Instead of celebrating, he named slavery as the cause of the war, and closed with a call to act 'with malice toward none, with charity for all': to finish the work, bind up the nation's wounds and seek a just and lasting peace. About six weeks later he was shot at Ford's Theatre. The speech is carved into a wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

Abraham LincolnRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Lost time is never found again.

The saying appeared in the 1748 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, the yearly almanac Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) published in Philadelphia from 1732 to 1758 under the name 'Richard Saunders'. It carried short sayings, many of them older proverbs that Franklin sharpened. The same year he wrote his best-known line on the subject: 'Remember that time is money.' In 1758 he gathered the almanac's best sayings in The Way to Wealth, where this one is followed by a warning: what we call 'time enough' always proves little enough.

Benjamin FranklinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Well done is better than well said.

The line appeared in the 1737 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, which Benjamin Franklin published every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name 'Richard Saunders'. With sales of up to 10,000 copies a year, 'Poor Richard' became a household name in the American colonies. The saying suited its author. Franklin (1706–1790) left school at ten and became a scientist, inventor and diplomat, known for practical results: he showed that lightning is electricity and invented the lightning rod. English has a close cousin: 'Actions speak louder than words.'

Benjamin FranklinRead card

DrivePhilosophy

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Roosevelt gave the speech 'The Strenuous Life' in Chicago on 10 April 1899, while he was Governor of New York. The year before, he had won fame leading a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders, in the Spanish–American War. He argued that a life of ease leads to decay, in a person and in a nation, and that success comes to those who do not shrink from hardship. The speech also defended the war the United States had just begun to keep control of the Philippines, which many criticised.

Theodore RooseveltRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was born into slavery in Virginia and freed at the end of the Civil War, when he was about nine. As a boy in Malden, West Virginia, he worked at salt furnaces and in a coal mine, studying when he could. In chapter 2 of his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), he recalls envying white boys, until he learned how success should be measured. In 1881 he became the first head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he built into a leading Black college.

Booker T. WashingtonRead card

DriveHistory

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Douglass spoke these words in August 1857 at Canandaigua, New York, marking the day in 1834 when Britain's law abolishing slavery in its Caribbean colonies took effect. In the United States slavery was still legal, and that March the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision had ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens. He added that the limits of tyrants are set by the endurance of those they oppress. Born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, he escaped in 1838 and became the best-known anti-slavery speaker of his time.

Frederick DouglassRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Truth is powerful and it prevails.

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) was born into slavery in New York State as Isabella Bomefree. In 1826 she walked away to freedom with her baby daughter, and in 1828 she won a court case to get back her young son, who had been illegally sold to Alabama. In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth (a sojourner stays a short while and moves on) and spent the rest of her life speaking against slavery and for women's rights. This line is widely quoted as hers, but its source is uncertain.

Sojourner TruthRead card

DriveMind

Failure is impossible.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) said this on 15 February 1906, at the celebration of her 86th birthday in Washington, less than a month before she died. She had campaigned for more than fifty years for women's right to vote; in 1872 she was arrested for voting and fined $100, which she never paid. Naming the women beside her, she said that with such women devoting their lives to the cause, failure was impossible. The phrase became a watchword of the suffrage movement. American women won the vote in 1920.

Susan B. AnthonyRead card

DriveMind

The best protection any woman can have is courage.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was the main organiser of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first women's rights convention. Her demand there for women's right to vote was the only resolution not passed unanimously. This line is widely quoted as hers, but it is not in her memoir, Eighty Years and More, or her speech 'Solitude of Self', and its source is uncertain. It fits that 1892 speech, which argued that every woman must finally face life alone and so needs education, self-reliance and training in self-protection.

Elizabeth Cady StantonRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

George Washington wrote this to Major General Philip Schuyler on 20 August 1775, less than two months after taking command of the Continental Army, the colonies' new army. Congress had ordered Schuyler, commanding in the north, to invade Canada, then a British province. As troops gathered, Washington urged him not to let difficulties dampen his effort. The campaign began well: American forces took Montreal in November 1775. But the attack on Quebec City on the last night of the year failed, and by summer 1776 the Americans had left Canada.

George WashingtonRead card

DriveHistory

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

Elizabeth I gave this speech on 9 August 1588 at Tilbury, on the Thames, to troops gathered against a Spanish invasion. The Armada had been beaten at Gravelines days earlier, but an army under the Duke of Parma still waited across the Channel. Riding among the soldiers in a breastplate, she answered doubts about a woman leading in war. The wording we know comes from a letter by Leonel Sharp, a chaplain who was there, published in 1654, so it is close to her words but not certainly exact.

Elizabeth IRead card

DrivePhilosophy

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) became famous nursing British soldiers in the Crimean War, then laid the foundations of modern nursing and used statistics to improve hospital care. She wrote this line in 1861, five years after returning from the Crimea, in a letter to her cousin Hilary Bonham Carter, later printed in Edward Cook's 1913 biography of her. In the same passage she says she had carried more responsibility for human lives than anyone before her, and that when a disaster happened she acted while others made excuses.

Florence NightingaleRead card

DrivePhilosophy

A stumble may prevent a fall.

This English proverb is recorded in the physician Thomas Fuller's collection Gnomologia (1732), and a 1643 political declaration had already said that whoever stumbles without falling gains ground rather than losing it. The idea is simple: a small slip, like catching your foot on a loose step, is a warning that comes while there is still time to act. Safety engineers work the same way with 'near misses', studying small incidents that caused no harm in order to prevent serious accidents.

English ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

With patience, the sour grape becomes halva and the mulberry leaf satin.

This Turkish proverb joins two slow transformations. Koruk is the sour, unripe grape; given time on the vine it ripens and turns sweet, and helva, a traditional sweet, stands for that sweetness. Atlas is a glossy satin woven from silk, and silk comes from the cocoons of silkworms fed on mulberry leaves. In both images something unpromising becomes precious, but only with time. A similar line circulates in English as a Chinese proverb: with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.

Traditional Turkish proverb: 'Sabırla koruk helva olur, dut yaprağı atlas'Read card

DrivePhilosophy

Per aspera ad astra.

The motto means 'through hardships to the stars'. No Roman author wrote it in exactly this form; it grew from older lines. Virgil's Aeneid (1st century BC) has 'sic itur ad astra', 'this is the way to the stars', and Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens says there is no easy road from the earth to the stars. Today the phrase and its variants are the mottoes of schools, air forces and the U.S. state of Kansas, whose version reverses the order: 'Ad astra per aspera'.

Latin ProverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Plato wrote this in the Republic (Book II, 377a), around 375 BC. In the dialogue, Socrates is discussing which stories should be told to the children who will grow up to guard the city. The beginning matters most, he says, especially for anything young and tender, because that is when character most readily takes the stamp we want to give it. Plato meant early education; the line is now quoted about starting anything.

Plato, Republic, Book IIRead card

DrivePhilosophy

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

This wording is not in the Analects, the collection of Confucius's sayings put together by his followers; it is a modern paraphrase. The Analects makes the same point with an image, in Book 9: steady effort is like raising a mound of earth. If I stop when just one basket is missing, the stopping is mine; if I tip a single basket onto level ground and carry on, the progress is mine too. Confucius (551–479 BC), a teacher from the state of Lu, valued persistence over speed.

Confucius (attributed)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

This wording is not found in Confucius's works. It echoes an older Chinese fable from the Liezi, a Daoist classic. The Foolish Old Man, nearly ninety, sets out with his family to dig away two mountains that block the way from his home, carrying the earth off in baskets. Mocked by a neighbour, he says his sons and grandsons will carry on; moved by his resolve, heaven has the mountains removed. Mao Zedong retold it in a 1945 speech, and it is still a byword in China for patient effort.

Confucius (attributed)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Modern editions print this line as Fragment 35 of Epictetus, but the attribution is shaky: Stobaeus, the 5th-century anthologist who preserved it, credits it to Pythagoras, and editors note that the style is unlike Epictetus. The idea is certainly his. A whole chapter of his Discourses, 'On Freedom', argues that a person ruled by desire and fear is not free, whatever their legal status. Epictetus knew slavery at first hand: he was born enslaved and later freed.

Epictetus, Fragment 35 (doubtful: Stobaeus gives it to Pythagoras)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Nothing like this appears in Michelangelo's letters, poems or early biographies. The earliest known printing is in E. C. McKenzie's Mac's Giant Book of Quips and Quotes (1980), with no author named; collections began crediting Michelangelo in the late 1990s. The name may have stuck because of his own career: known above all as a sculptor, he took on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508 with little experience of fresco and finished it four years later.

Anonymous; first printed 1980, credited to Michelangelo from the late 1990sRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.