Journal #21

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
To me, this quote is very full of truth.  To word it in a more reasonable way, it is saying you only get out what you put in.  You cannot expect things to just happen for you.  "No kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."  If you plant a seed, unless you are really lucky, your plant will never come up if you leave it to fend for itself.  A beautiful flower or flush red tomatoes will never be yours to behold.  That is, until you come to that point in your life when you realize that this is your life to live and what you want to happen will not unless you make it happen.  “When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.” I believe John M. Richardson, Jr. said this.  I feel like these two phrases of words are similar.  They both speak of how you are going to live life.  You have various options.  You do not have to make anything happen for yourself.  You can sit there and watch other people do it, BUT you don't have to watch people do it either.  In the first quote it talks about how you come to a point in your education where you realize you are just not content to watch people anymore.  You want to make things happen.  Yourself.

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/happen/