William E Tolman High School - Redjacket Yearbook (Pawtucket, RI)

Page 11 text:

Mr. Thomas J. Moriarty Message To The Eighteen hundred years ago, Marcus Aureli- us Antoninus, Roman Emperor and philosopher, said: Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live . What more appropriate message could be given to a graduating class as they leave their high school days behind and launch out upon the serious business of carving out a career for them- selves! As we wake each morning, we are faced with 24 golden hours, of 60 minutes each, ours to utilize, ours to squander, ours to do with as we please. No one can give us more than these 24 hours, no one can take away any part of them. What use we make of them, whether we spend them in profitable enterprise, whether we waste them in time-consuming trivialities, is entirely up to us. Only we can give an accounting of how we spent that precious time! It takes almost as much time and energy to fail as it does to succeed. Why then, if with the same energy we must use in any case, we might be succeeding, do we so seldom live the lives we hoped and planned to live? Part of the answer lies in the careless use of time, in making excuses for our failures, in trying to convince ourselves that we didn’t have time, that we did not get the breaks”, any one of a myriad of excuses for our failure to utilize our time. Any person who has failed can provide himself with an alibi for that failure, but it takes real honest-to-goodness cour- age to make each failure a stepping-stone, to rise above failure, to learn from them. And courage is the sine qua non of success. Success is exactly equivalent to doing our best, and only by acting as if it were impossible to fail can we discover the farthest reaches of what our best may offer. Our quotation from Marcus Aurelius has been paraphrased many times in popular, every- day expressions, such as Do it now!” Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today!” Procrastination is the thief of time” It is later than you think!” All of these convey the same Graduating Class idea, that we must make the most of every oppor- tunity, every day, every minute of every day. Waste not a single precious moment of your time, even though it appears that we have an abundance of it. On this does final success de- pend. My fondest wish for the graduating class is personal success in whatever you undertake, in whatever sphere of life you choose to follow, no matter how important or how humble. Your personal success may not be acclaimed by the world, but at least it will give you that inner glow, that sense of well-being, that personal satis- faction which permeates our consciousness when we have made the most of our abilities and our opportunities. Such success can only reflect cred- it upon yourselves, and upon the institution you are now leaving. Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live”! Thomas J. Moriarty, Assistant Principal

Page 13 text:

TOLMAN HIGH SCHOOL