Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to something which needs no advocate but itself. – Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” The Atlantic Monthl

The trick to playing second fiddle is to play it like second Stradivarius. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. – Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire