○  russell conwell : acres of diamonds  ○

hat it is a man with a head like a bushel measure or a man like a stroke of lighting? it is neither. the really great man is a plain, straightforward, every-day, common-sense man. you would not dream that he was a great inventor if you did not see something he had actually done. his neighbors do not regard him so great.

you never see anything great over your back fence. you say there is no greatness among your neighbors. it is all away off somewhere else. their greatness is ever so simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and friends never recognize it.

true greatness is often unrecognized. that is sure. you do not know anything about the greatest men and women. i went out to write the life of general garfield, and a neighbor, knowing i was in a hurry, and as there was a great crowd around the front door, took me around to general garfield’s back door and shouted, “jim! jim!” and very soon “jim” came to the door and let me in, and i wrote the biography of one of the grandest men of the nation, and yet he was just the same old “jim” to his neighbor. if you know a great man in philadelphia and you should meet him to-morrow, you would say, “how are you, sam?” or “good morning, jim.” of course you would. that is just what you would do. 

one of my soldiers in the civil war had been sentenced to death, and i went up to the white house in washington-sent there for the first time in my life-to see the president. i went into the waiting-room and sat down with a lot of others on the benches, and the secretary asked one after another to tell him what they wanted. after the secretary had been through the line, he went in, and then came back to the door and motioned for me. i went up to that anteroom, and the secretary said: “that is the president’s door right over there. just rap on it and go right in.” i was never so taken aback, friends, in all my life, never. the secretary himself made it worse for me, because

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