Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's reading was edited and adapted from,

Heading for Victory, We're Getting the Most Out of Life

by Orison Swet Martin,

published in 1920.

When someone asked the great sculptor Herbert

wore the name of his best work,

his masterpiece,

the artist replied, My next one. The only way to make life a masterpiece

is to make every day the best, to make each one an advance upon the previous day.

The great masters who made their reputations by their wonderful mosaics and stained glass

were extremely careful in the selection of the individual bits of marble, for of the glass

which went into the particular thing they were making.

Every piece had to be perfect, and no labor was too great to make it so.

Suppose they had not taken infinite pains, and merely picked up pieces of material wherever they could find them,

with little regard to their fitness, their shape or coloring, without any special effort

to make them harmonize with their great design.

Where would have been the masterpieces?

What would have been the artist's reputations?

Time is the material with which we are working.

And if each year we put into our life pattern many inferior pieces, will it be a perfect

mosaic?

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