Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)Roosevelt, Theodore
History
Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)
Roosevelt, Theodore
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919; United States -- Politics and government -- 1901-1909
Well, I guess I have said about all I have to say. Success does not
lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of
Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as
the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong
man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of
the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail
nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near
to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule—there are, of
course, exceptions—finally achieve the success best worth having, the
success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having
lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a
good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little
better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a
doer of the word and not a hearer only—still less a mere critic of the
doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to
win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.
There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is
success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional
man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It
comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other
kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the
success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could
do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or
possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to
a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the
men who stand high—who stand in all but the very highest places—are
those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war,
art, literature—in whatever calling; but who have developed within
themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of
repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage,
of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance
of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding
perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these
qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a
measure of success; and I greet you here on this twentieth anniversary
of the founding of Groton School because I feel that Groton School is
one of those institutions which pre-eminently stand for the development
of precisely those qualities among the boys whom it sends forth to be
American men, American citizens, to do honor to themselves and their
school by honoring the commonwealth to which we all belong.
ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG, PA., MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1904
_Governor, and You, my Fellow-Citizens_:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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