Acres of Diamonds quotes

He said that Ali Hafed owned a very large farm, that he had orchards, grain-fields, and gardens; that he had money at interest, and was a wealthy and contented man.

He was contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented.

One day there visited that old Persian farmer one of these ancient Buddhist priests, one of the wise men of the East. He sat down by the fire and told the old farmer how this world of ours was made.

If this internal molten mass came bursting out and cooled very quickly it became granite; less quickly copper, less quickly silver, less quickly gold, and, after gold, diamonds were made.

Said the old priest, “A diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight.”

Now that is literally scientifically true, that a diamond is an actual deposit of carbon from the sun.

Ali Hafed heard all about diamonds, how much they were worth, and went to his bed that night a poor man.

He had not lost anything, but he was poor because he was discontented, and discontented because he feared he was poor.

He said, “I want a mine of diamonds,” and he lay awake all night.

I remember saying to myself, “Why did he reserve that story for his ‘particular friends’?” There seemed to be no beginning, no middle, no end, nothing to it.

That was the first story I had ever heard told in my life, and would be the first one I ever read, in which the hero was killed in the first chapter.

I had but one chapter of that story, and the hero was dead.

When that old Arab guide told me the second chapter of his story, he then took off his Turkish cap and swung it around in the air again to get my attention to the moral.

Those Arab guides have morals to their stories, although they are not always moral.

As he swung his hat, he said to me, “Had Ali Hafed remained at home and dug in his own cellar, or underneath his own wheat-fields, or in his own garden, instead of wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange land, he would …

… eight years ago I delivered this lecture in a city that stands on that farm, and they told me that a one-third owner for years and years had been getting one hundred and twenty dollars in gold every fifteen minutes, sleeping or waking, without taxation.

You and I would enjoy an income like that—if we didn’t have to pay an income tax.

But a better illustration really than that occurred here in our own Pennsylvania.

So this Pennsylvania farmer wrote to his cousin asking for employment. You see, friends, this farmer was not altogether a foolish man. No, he was not. He did not leave his farm until he had something else to do. *

Of all the simpletons the stars shine on I don’t know of a worse one than the man who leaves one job before he has gotten another.

That has especial reference to my profession, and has no reference whatever to a man seeking a divorce. When he wrote to his cousin for employment, his cousin replied, “I cannot engage you because you know nothing about the oil business.”

Said his mother, “Now, Charlie, it is just as well to be happy as it is to be rich.”

“Yes,” said Charlie, “but it is just as well to be rich and happy, too.”

And they were both right about it. As he was an only son and she a widow, of course he had his way. They always do.

“Yes,” said Charlie, “but it is just as well to be rich and happy, too.” And they were both right about it.

As he was an only son and she a widow, of course he had his way. They always do.

They sold out in Massachusetts, and instead of going to California they went to Wisconsin, where he went into the employ of the Superior Copper Mining Company at $15 a week again, but with the proviso in his contract that he should have an interest …

“Yes, of course I do.” They say, “Isn’t that awful! Why don’t you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man’s making money?”

“Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.”

That is the reason. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community.

Oh, the inconsistency of such doctrines as that!

Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it.

You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it.

Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it.

Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them.

I am always willing that my church should raise my salary, because the church that pays the largest salary always raises it the easiest. You never knew an exception to it in your life.

While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves—let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one else.

It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.

Let us give in to that argument and pass that to one side.

Oh yes, I know by the grave that has left me standing alone that there are some things in this world that are higher and sweeter and purer than money. Well do I know there are some things higher and grander than gold.

Love is the grandest thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money.

Money is power, money is force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.

But another young man gets up over there and says, “I cannot take up the mercantile business.” (While I am talking of trade it applies to every occupation.) “Why can’t you go into the mercantile business?” “Because I haven’t any capital.”

Oh, the weak and dudish creature that can’t see over its collar!

It makes a person weak to see these little dudes standing around the corners and saying, “Oh, if I had plenty of capital, how rich I would get.” “Young man, do you think you are going to get rich on capital?” “Certainly.”

It will curse you through your years, and deprive you of the very best things of human life. There is no class of people to be pitied so much as the inexperienced sons and daughters of the rich of our generation.

I pity the rich man’s son.

He can never know the best things in life.

He could not carry paper and envelopes twenty feet. I suppose he could not get his arms down to do it. I have no pity for such travesties upon human nature. If you have not capital, young man, I am glad of it.

What you need is common sense, not copper cents.

The best thing I can do is to illustrate by actual facts well-known to you all. A. T. Stewart, a poor boy in New York, had $1.50 to begin life on. He lost 87 1/2 cents of that on the very first venture.

The richest man in this country to-day, if you read the real-estate values, has never moved away from a town of 3,500 inhabitants.

It makes not so much difference where you are as who you are.

But if you cannot get rich in Philadelphia you certainly cannot do it in New York.

But his wife made up her mind one day that they would starve to death if there wasn’t something or other invented pretty soon, and so in two hours she invented the sewing-machine.

Of course he took out the patent in his name. Men always do that.

Who was it that invented the mower and the reaper? According to Mr.

It is neither. The really great man is a plain, straightforward, every-day, common-sense man. You would not dream that he was a great inventor if you did not see something he had actually done. His neighbors do not regard him so great.

You never see anything great over your back fence.

You say there is no greatness among your neighbors. It is all away off somewhere else. Their greatness is ever so simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and friends never recognize it.

You never see anything great over your back fence. You say there is no greatness among your neighbors. It is all away off somewhere else. Their greatness is ever so simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and friends never recognize it.

True greatness is often unrecognized.

That is sure. You do not know anything about the greatest men and women.

I have no sympathy with the old man who says, “I would just as soon march up to the cannon’s mouth as eat my dinner.”

I have no faith in a man who doesn’t know enough to be afraid when he is being shot at.

I never was so afraid when the shells came around us at Antietam as I was when I went into that room that day; but I finally mustered the courage—I don’t know how I ever did—and at arm’s-length tapped on the door.

Did you ever see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great?

He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by his big feet.

There is no greatness there.

Oh, I learned the lesson then that I will never forget so long as the tongue of the bell of time continues to swing for me.

Greatness consists not in the holding of some future office, but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life.

To be great at all one must be great here, now, in Philadelphia. He who can give to this city better streets and better sidewalks, better schools and more colleges, more happiness and more civilization, more of God, he will be great anywhere.

In this, indeed, lies his power. He makes his church interesting, his sermons interesting, his lectures interesting. He is himself interesting! Because of his being interesting, he gains attention. The attention gained, he inspires.

Biography is more than dates. Dates, after all, are but mile-stones along the road of life.

And the most important fact of Conwell’s life is that he lived to be eighty-two, working sixteen hours every day for the good of his fellow-men.

and then his intensely practical side his intense efficiency, his power, his skill, his patience, his fine earnestness, his mastery over others, develop his dreams into realities.

He dreams dreams and sees visions—but his visions are never visionary and his dreams become facts.

The rocky hills which meant a dogged struggle for very existence, the fugitive slaves, John Brown—what a school for youth!

“When I stood beside the body of John Ring and realized that he had died for love of me, I made a vow that has formed my life.

I vowed that from that moment I would live not only my own life, but that I would also live the life of John Ring.

And from that moment I have worked sixteen hours every day—eight for John Ring’s work and eight hours for my own.”

“Oh yes, it was a wrench; but there is a sort of romance of self-sacrifice, you know.

I rather suppose the old-time martyrs rather enjoyed themselves in being martyrs!

”

“Enthusiasm invites enthusiasm,” is another of his points of importance; and one understands that it is by deliberate purpose, and not by chance, that he tries with such tremendous effort to put enthusiasm into his hearers with every sermon and every lecture that he delivers.

“It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test of an orator’s control of his audience to be able to land them again on the solid earth of sober thinking.”

I have known him at the very end of a sermon have a ripple of laughter sweep freely over the entire congregation, and then in a moment he has every individual under his control, listening soberly to his words.

“Be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear,” he writes; and with delightfully terse common sense, he says,

“Use illustrations that illustrate”

—and never did an orator live up to this injunction more than does Conwell himself.

Yet it is never by a striking effort that attention is gained, except in so far that his utter simplicity is striking.

“I want to preach so simply that you will not think it preaching, but just that you are listening to a friend,”

I remember his saying, one Sunday morning, as he began his sermon; and then he went on just as simply as such homely, kindly, friendly words promised. And how effectively!

Garfield, to go with me to Mr. Garfield’s home and introduce me. When we got there, a neighbor had to find him. ‘Jim! Jim!’ he called. You see, Garfield was just plain Jim to his old neighbors.

It’s hard to recognize a hero over your back fence!

” He paused a moment for the appreciative ripple to subside, and went on:

He has a typically homely way of expressing it by one of his favorite maxims, one that he loves to repeat encouragingly to friends who are in difficulties themselves or who know of the difficulties that are his; and this heartening maxim is, “

Trust in God and do the next thing.

”

“If your rooms are big the people will come and fill them,” he likes to say. The same effort that wins a small success would, rightly directed, have won a great success. “

Think big things and then do them!

”

He knows and will admit that he works hard and has all his life worked hard.

“Things keep turning my way because I’m on the job,”

as he whimsically expressed it one day; but that is about all, so it seems to him.

And it knows of many a case of the rise of a Temple student that reads like an Arabian Nights’ fancy!—of advance from bookkeeper to editor, from office-boy to bank president, from kitchen maid to school principal, from street-cleaner to mayor!

The Temple University helps them that help themselves.

President Conwell told me personally of one case that especially interested him because it seemed to exhibit, in especial degree, the Temple possibilities; and it particularly interested me because it also showed, in high degree, the methods and personality of Dr. Conwell himself.

I remember how simply and easily this was said, in his clear, deep voice, and how impressive and important it seemed, and with what unexpectedness it came.

“Come and make an acquaintance that will last for eternity!”

And there was a serenity about his way of saying this which would make strangers think—just as he meant them to think—that he had nothing whatever to do but to talk with them.

As we walked one day beside this brook, he suddenly said: “

Did you ever notice that every brook has its own song? I should know the song of this brook anywhere.

”

The ambition of Russell Conwell is to continue working and working until the very last moment of his life. In work he forgets his sadness, his loneliness, his age.

And he said to me one day, “I will die in harness.”

CONSIDERING everything, the most remarkable thing in Russell Conwell’s remarkable life is his lecture, “Acres of Diamonds.”

When I suggested that this was surely an example of bread cast upon the waters that could not return, he was silent for a little and then said, thoughtfully: “

As one gets on in years there is satisfaction in doing a thing for the sake of doing it.

The bread returns in the sense of effort made.”

I have lived to see accomplished far more than my highest ambition included, and have seen the enterprises I have undertaken rush by me, pushed on by a thousand strong hands until they have left me far behind them.

The realities are like dreams to me.

Blessings on the loving hearts and noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice for others’ good and to think only of what they could do, and never of what they should get!