Vivekananda Mailing List-11/17/02

[Guest guest]

Every man should take up his own ideal and endeavour to accomplish it.

That is a surer way of progress than taking up other men's ideals,

which he can never hope to accomplish. For instance, we take a child

and at once give him the task of walking twenty miles. Either the

little one dies, or one in a thousand crawls the twenty miles, to reach

the end exhausted and half-dead. That is like what we generally try to

do with the world. All the men and women, in any society, are not of

the same mind, capacity, or of the same power to do things; they must

have different ideals, and we have no right to sneer at any ideal. Let

every one do the best he can for realising his own ideal. Nor is it

right that I should be judged by your standard or you by mine. The

apple tree should not be judged by the standard of the oak, nor the oak

by that of the apple. To judge the apple tree you must take the apple

standard, and for the oak, its own standard.