Goethe on Perseverance

We've been reading from the "Perseverance" chapter in William Bennett's Book of Virtues lately.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe definitely didn't get everything right, but he did well with this one:

We must not hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.


It is not just as we take it,
This mystical world of ours,
Life's field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.