Tyndall said of him, "He is the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen." When Sir Humphry Davy was asked what was his greatest discovery, he replied "Michael Faraday." "What has been done can be done again," said the boy with no chance, Disraeli, who become Lord Beaconsfield, England's great Prime Minister.
"I am not a slave, I am not a captive, and by energy I can overcome greater obstacles." Jewish blood flowed in his veins and everything seemed against him, but he remembered the example of Joseph, who became Prime Minister of Egypt four thousand years before, and that of Daniel, who was Prime Minister to the greatest despot of the world five centuries before the birth of Christ.

He pushed his way up through the lower classes, up through the middle classes, up through the upper classes, until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of political and social power.

Rebuffed, scorned, ridiculed, hissed down in the House of Commons, he simply said, "The time will come when you will hear me." The time did come, and the boy with no chance but a determined will swayed the scepter of England for a quarter of a century.
Henry Clay, the "mill-boy of the slashes," was one of seven children of a widow too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among self-made men.

The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of American orators and statesmen.
See Kepler struggling with poverty and hardship, his books burned in public by order of the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and himself exiled by public clamor.

For seventeen years he works calmly upon the demonstration of the great principles that planets revolve in ellipses, with the sun at one focus; that a line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times, and that the squares of the times of revolution of the planets above the sun are proportioned to the cubes by their mean distances from the sun.