Success Quote by Joshua Chamberlain

Chamberlain’s sentence doesn’t just praise virtue; it drafts an emergency plan for the soul. Written in the register of a soldier-scholar, it treats character as something you rehearse long before the battlefield demands it. The key move is practical and almost managerial: if you can “hold our spirits and our bodies” “pure and high,” then nobility isn’t a mood, it’s muscle memory. That pairing of spirit and body matters. A Civil War officer knew that courage is not merely belief; it’s posture, fatigue, hunger, discipline, and the slow grind of keeping yourself intact when chaos makes improvisers out of men.

The quote’s intent is preparatory: cultivate inner standards so decisively that the future can’t bargain you down. “Determine and know what manner of men we will be” rejects the romantic myth that crisis reveals a hidden “true self.” Chamberlain argues the opposite: crisis enforces whatever self you’ve trained. The subtext is a warning to the comfortable. If you haven’t practiced lofty purpose in ordinary hours, the “hour” won’t magically upgrade you; it will expose your defaults.

Context does the rest. Chamberlain, remembered for decisive leadership at Gettysburg, speaks from a world where “noble action” had literal consequences: holding a line, ordering a charge, risking lives. The rhetoric climbs deliberately, stacking “thoughts,” “ideals,” “dreams” into a rising cadence, then landing on the blunt, clocklike strike of duty. It’s moral elevation with a soldier’s deadline: be ready, because history doesn’t schedule its exams around your self-improvement.