Now," said Grant, "it was my mother's being without butter that made me general and president." But he was mistaken.

It was his own shrewdness to see the chance, and the promptness to seize it, that urged him upward.
"There is nobody," says a Roman Cardinal, "whom Fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she finds he is not ready to receive her, she goes in at the door, and out through the window." Opportunity is coy.
The careless, the slow, the unobservant, the lazy fail to see it, or clutch at it when it has gone.

The sharp fellows detect it instantly, and catch it when on the wing.
The utmost which can be said about the matter is, that circumstances will, and do combine to help men at some periods of their lives, and combine to thwart them at others.

Thus much we freely admit; but there is no fatality in these combinations, neither any such thing as "luck" or "chance," as commonly understood.

They come and go like all other opportunities and occasions in life, and if they are seized upon and made the most of, the man whom they benefit is fortunate; but if they are neglected and allowed to pass by unimproved, he is unfortunate.
"Charley," says Moses H.Grinnell to a clerk born in New York City, "take my overcoat tip to my house on Fifth Avenue." Mr.Charley takes the coat, mutters something about "I'm not an errand boy.