I urge one and all to live this life as if there is no reward in the afterlife and to do it in a moral way that makes it better for you and for those around you, and that leaves this world a little better place than when you found it.
Man has not yet learned to work for the joy of work, learn for the sake of growth, create for the expression and the exaltation in the act, or to love simply for the pleasure of loving: he still requires a reward. Until a man learns to do these things, hope will have to be his basic motivating force. In work, he'll require more wages and better titles; in knowledge, he'll require degrees and diplomas; in creativity, he'll require recognition; in love, he'll require assurance. Until he appreciates that each of these are their own reward, he'll need hope as his crutch. There is nothing wrong with hope; it is simply the second best thing. For love goes beyond hope. Hope is a beginning. Love is forever.
At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."
At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."
This I do know beyond any reasonable doubt. Regardless of what you are doing, if you pump long enough, hard enough and enthusiastically enough, sooner or later the effort will bring forth the reward.