Opportunity: and other essays and addresses By John Lancaster Spalding

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If I'm left alone, yet God and all the heroic dead are with me still. If a great city is my dwelling place, the superficial life of noise and haste shall teach me how blessed a thing it is to live within in the company of true thoughts and high resolves.

Whatever can help me to think and love, whatever can give me strength and patience, whatever can make me humble and serviceable, though it be a trifle light as air, is opportunity, whose whim it is to hide in unconsidered things, in chance acquaintance and casual speech, in the falling of the apple, in floating weeds or the accidental explosion in a chemist's mortar.
Wisdom is habited in plainest garb, and she walks modestly, unheeded of the gaping and wondering crowd. She rules over the kingdom of little things, in which the lowly minded hold the places of privilege. Her secrets are revealed to the careful, the patient and the humble.
They may be learned from the ant or the flower that blooms in some hidden spot or from the lips of husbandsmen and housewives.

He is wise who finds a teacher in every man, an occasion to improve in every happening, for whom nothing is useless or in vain.

Priceless..

Opportunity: and other essays and addresses