Advice to clerks and hints to employers, showing the road to preferment and comfort, by an experienced clerk

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C. Mitchell, 1848 - 80 pages

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Page 52 - We are offered, by the terms of this sale, six months' credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your veracity, and sink...
Page 48 - So what signifies wishing and hoping for better times? We may make these, times better if we bestir ourselves. ' Industry need not wish, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help hands, for I have no lands,' or if I have they are smartly taxed.
Page 51 - So much for industry, my friends, and attention to one's own business; but to these we must add frugality if we would make our industry more certainly successful. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a groat at last. A fat kitchen makes a lean will; and Many estates are spent in the getting, Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting, And men for punch forsook hewing and splitting.
Page 55 - Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears ; while the used key is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is the stuff" life is made of, as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep ! forgetting, that The sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping etwugh in the grave, as Poor Richard says. " If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be...
Page 55 - ... ease or deliver us, by allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says in his Almanack of 1733.
Page 55 - Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy, and he that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night ; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him. Drive thy business, let not that drive thee ; and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,
Page 51 - If you would be wealthy, says he, in another Almanack, think of Saving as well as of Getting: The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her Outgoes are greater than her Incomes.
Page 48 - ... as poor Richard says : but then the trade must be worked at, and the calling well followed, or neither the estate nor the office will enable us to pay our taxes. If we are industrious, we shall never starve ; for ' at the working man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter.
Page 56 - II. of Prussia, even after age and infirmities had increased upon him, gave strict orders never to be allowed to sleep later than four in the morning. Peter the Great, whether at work in the docks at London as a ship-carpenter, or at the anvil as a blacksmith, or on the throne of Russia, always arose before daylight. " I am," says he, " for making my life as long as I can, and therefore sleep as little as possible.
Page 56 - I will here record an observation, which I have found of great use to myself, and to which I may say, that the production of this work and most of my other writings, is owing; viz.

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