Each day is a new opportunity to grab hold of success, of nobility, of integrity! Little increments of time, in which we choose the higher road, is what makes our life a triumph. Let’s look at today as one long succession of opportunities to grow in grace and in character!

The Catholic Book of Character and Success by Fr. Edward F. Garesche

As you stand on the threshold of the future, what is before you?

You are an unknown quantity even to yourself. Your coming days are like a blank check in which you must fill the significant figures. They are like an empty page on which you must write the record of nobleness or ignominy or mere dull mediocrity.

You have within you the stuff of heroes, and you have also within you instincts and tendencies that, yielded to, will make you a degraded criminal.

You feel the pull of opposite tendencies: now you dream of great things; now you are tugged downward by impulses of which you are ashamed.

But you are the captain of your own soul; you are the arbiter of your own destiny.

God and man both give you a fair chance, a noble opportunity. God has endowed you with a free will, the divine prerogative of choosing between good and evil. He has given you a body and a soul, both excellent and beneficial, the climax of His visible creation.

He has brought you into being, without a past, but with a splendid future, if you will seize it by your free and virtuous effort.

At the same time, you cannot be really free without having the choice between good and evil, and if you deliberately choose what is evil and base, you may have it and, with it, the dark consequence of a ruined life, lost opportunities, and dismal failure.

You have everything that you need from God to become a noble person, upright, God-fearing, respected, and successful, in the right meaning of success.

In what land on earth do you have brighter opportunities, greater rewards of service, a finer field of manly effort, than in our country today?

You are the heir of all the centuries in literature, in art, in science, in commerce, and in every avenue of achievement.

True, the world is full of temptations and opportunities for evil, as it always was, but it is full of far greater opportunities, far more multiplied chances, for good.

If you choose to invest your life as you should, you have a field of sublime excellence for that investment.

Your feet are set at the entrance to a great battlefield where the victors are all heroes. With courage, confidence, hopefulness, and steadfastness, you are sure to win, because you have nothing to fear but your own weakness, your own cowardice.

All people are, in a way, continually beginning, making a new start each morning and each new year….

“While there is life, there is hope,” as an old writer has said.

“Men are made of clay, and clay, though it is easily broken, is likewise easily mended.”

Even those who have lost the opportunities of youth and have hitherto made failures of their lives, may, at any moment, begin to struggle upward. They may recapture, by courage and resolve, the first glow of youthful virtue.

Success in life rests on definite principles and depends on each man’s free choice. According to those principles, it can be surely gained or surely lost, according to the workings of the great laws of human nature. Choose rightly, and you will make a success of life.

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