He never gives up what he undertakes." While Horace Greeley would devote a column of the New York _Tribune_ to an article, Thurlow Weed would treat the same subject in a few words in the Albany _Evening Journal_, and put the argument into such shape as to carry far more conviction.
"If you would be pungent," says Southey, "be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed the deeper they burn." "The only valuable kind of study," said Sydney Smith, "is to read so heartily that dinner-time comes two hours before you expected it; to sit with your Livy before you and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol, and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae, and heaping them into bushels, and to be so intimately present at the actions you are reading of, that when anybody knocks at the door it will take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own study or on the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's weather-beaten face and admiring the splendor of his single eye." "Never study on speculation," says Waters; "all such study is vain.

Form a plan; have an object; then work for it; learn all you can about it, and you will be sure to succeed.

What I mean by studying on speculation is that aimless learning of things because they may be useful some day; which is like the conduct of the woman who bought at auction a brass door-plate with the name of Thompson on it, thinking it might be useful some day!" "I resolved, when I began to read law," said Edward Sugden, afterward Lord St.Leonard, "to make everything I acquired perfectly my own, and never go on to a second reading till I had entirely accomplished the first.

Many of the competitors read as much in a day as I did in a week; but at the end of twelve months my knowledge was as fresh as on the day it was acquired, while theirs had glided away from their recollection." "Very often," says Sidney Smith, "the modern precept of education is, 'Be ignorant of nothing.' But my advice is, have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, that you may avoid the calamity of being ignorant of all things." "Lord, help me to take fewer things into my hands, and to do them well," is a prayer recommended by Paxton Hood to an overworked man.
"Many persons seeing me so much engaged in active life," said Edward Bulwer Lytton, "and as much about the world as if I had never been a student, have said to me, 'When do you get time to write all your books?
How on earth do you contrive to do so much work ?' I shall surprise you by the answer I made.

The answer is this--I contrive to do so much work by never doing too much at a time.