The following are excerpts from the book How to Live Nobly & Well: Timeless Principles for Achieving True Success and Lasting Happiness by Edward F. Garesché. An abridged re-print was published by Sophia Institute Press in 1999, but it is no longer in print. Although the book is out of print, used copies can be purchased through Amazon or Abebooks.
Choose what will improve your character.
Action increases the habit of tendency from which it springs, much as a muscle grows stronger and stronger by use and weaker and weaker by disuse. You can change, improve, or degrade your character to a marvelous degree by voluntary and repeated action, either good or evil. Every deed you do comes with its own reward or punishment, in that it strengthens the proneness to good in you, if it is good, or increases the tendency to evil in you, if it is evil.
One who constantly and systematically does what is right can change a vicious, warped, disagreeable natural character into one of great kindness and virtue; whereas one who was born with a very good and genial disposition can spoil it by yielding to unkindness and other forms of evil. It is immensely important for you to grasp with this principle and to act on it.
If there is anything in you that you judge to be bad, dangerous, or an impediment, begin now and, day after day, act against that bad tendency. Little by little it will grow weaker the more you oppose it, and the contrary habit of goodness will increase. After long effort, you will become as strong as you were once weak and as dependable and constant as you were once changeable and unreliable.
Environment
The people we associate with, the work we do, the amusements we seek, and the books we read all have a continual and powerful influence on our character.
When you form friendships, when you read books, when you engage in amusement, it may seem to you that it makes very little difference how you choose, provided you suit yourself. But every one of these things has a tremendous and lasting influence on your personality.
If you seek people who are refined, upright, principled, noble, and humane, you yourself will tend to become like them. If you choose friends who are rough, course, vicious, and unprincipled, you will assimilate yourself to them.
So, too, the amusement you select tend to mold your mind and feelings to their liking.
Any entertainment that is degraded, course, or cheap cheapens and or coarsens your imagination and your disposition. Any amusement that is elevated and noble elevates an ennobles you.
This is an eminently true of books. Take up a trashy, especially a vial, book and allow its trashy and vile thoughts to pass through your mind, their imprint will be left permanently on your character. The memory never really forgets anything; imagination never loses anything that is thrown into its vast receptacle.
We will have to exercise real self-discipline, sometimes hard self-denial, to curb the lower part of your nature and follow your higher impulses in choosing friends, amusements, and books. But the sacrifice and the effort are as worthwhile as a noble life is worthwhile.
Everyone has it within his own power to choose his friends, to choose his recreation, to choose his reading, just as he has it within his own power to resist evil habits thus to diminish them in his character, and to follow good lines of action and thus to cultivate virtues.
There is no other way to have a fine character, a worthwhile personality, except by this continual effort, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice. Those who really succeed can find no other way but the way of self-discipline and self-control.
Persevere in Noble Pursuits
The word perseverance comes from the Latin per, which means "through," and severus, which means "strict."
There is a good deal of wisdom in this derivation. A persevering person is one who is strict with himself, who is hard on himself, who disregards his natural feelings, his cravings and grudges, and hammers through in spite of his own weakness.
The greatest obstacles to perseverance are often not the difficulties we meet from without, but the difficulties that come from within. If you are strong enough to overcome yourself then you are going to persevere.
Perseverance is not so much getting results quickly that counts as keeping at a reasonable degree of effort in the same direction. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but rather to the man who will keep trying. Everlasting perseverance, the quality of getting up after every fall and coming back after every blow, wins at last.
Prudence must, of course, direct your perseverance one must be sure that what he is making a persevering effort to achieve is really worth having. Every ambition and every aspiration ought to be tested with a touchstone of genuine worth. Anyone who starts out after something that is really not worth having is wasting the fine quality of perseverance.
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