How to Succeed, Orison Swett Marden [reading diary .txt] 📗
- Author: Orison Swett Marden
- Performer: -
Book online «How to Succeed, Orison Swett Marden [reading diary .txt] 📗». Author Orison Swett Marden
"But the most marvelous exhibition of the man's nerve and of the absolute confidence he has in himself was yet to come. After the proceedings in the Senate chamber Cleveland was conducted to the east end of the Capitol to take the oath of office and deliver his inaugural address. He wore a close buttoned Prince Albert coat, and between the buttons he thrust his right hand, while his left he carried behind him. In this position he stood until the applause which greeted him had subsided, when he began his address.
"I looked for him to produce a manuscript, but he did not, and as he progressed in clear and distinct tones, without hesitation, I was amazed. With sixty millions of people, yes, with the entire civilized world looking on, this man had the courage to deliver an inaugural address making him President of the United States as coolly and as unconcernedly as if he were addressing a ward meeting. It was the most remarkable spectacle this or any other country has ever beheld."
Believe in yourself; you may succeed when others do not believe in you, but never when you do not believe in yourself.
"Ah! John Hunter, still hard at work!" exclaimed a physician on finding the old anatomist at the dissecting table. "Yes, doctor, and you'll find it difficult to meet with another John Hunter when I am gone."
"Heaven takes a hundred years to form a great genius for the regeneration of an empire and afterward rests a hundred years," said Kaunitz, who had administered the affairs of his country with great success for half a century. "This makes me tremble for the Austrian monarchy after my death."
"Isn't it beautiful that I can sing so?" asked Jenny Lind, naïvely, of a friend.
"My Lord," said William Pitt in 1757 to the Duke of Devonshire, "I am sure that I can save this country and that nobody else can." He did save it.
What seems to us disagreeable egotism in others is often but a strong expression of confidence in their ability to attain. Great men have usually had great confidence in themselves. Wordsworth felt sure of his place in history and never hesitated to say so. Dante predicted his own fame. Kepler said it did not matter whether his contemporaries read his books or not. "I may well wait a century for a reader since God has waited six thousand years for an observer like myself." "Fear not," said Julius Cæsar to his pilot frightened in a storm, "thou bearest Cæsar and his good fortunes."
When the Directory at Paris found that Napoleon had become in one month the most famous man in Europe they determined to check his career, and appointed Kellerman his associate in command. Napoleon promptly, but respectfully, tendered his resignation, saying, "One bad general is better than two good ones; war, like government, is mainly decided by tact." This decision immediately brought the Directory to terms.
Emperor Francis was extremely anxious to prove the illustrious descent of his prospective son-in-law. Napoleon refused to have the account published, remarking, "I had rather be the descendant of an honest man than of any petty tyrant of Italy. I wish my nobility to commence with myself and derive all my titles from the French people. I am the Rudolph of Hapsburg of my family. My patent of nobility dates from the battle of Montenotte."
When Napoleon was informed that the British Government had decreed that he should be recognized only as general, he said, "They cannot prevent me from being myself."
An Englishman asked Napoleon at Elba who was the greatest general of the age, adding, "I think Wellington." To which the Emperor replied, "He has not yet measured himself against me."
"Well matured and well disciplined talent is always sure of a market," said Washington Irving; "but it must not cower at home and expect to be sought for. There is a good deal of cant, too, about the success of forward and impudent men, while men of retiring worth are passed over with neglect. But it usually happens that those forward men have that valuable quality of promptness and activity, without which worth is a mere inoperative property. A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion."
"Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears."
"You may deceive all the people some of the time," said Lincoln, "some of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time." We cannot deceive ourselves any of the time, and the only way to enjoy our own respect is to deserve it. What would you think of a man who would neglect himself and treat his shadow with the greatest respect?
"Self-reliance is a grand element of character," says Michael Reynolds. "It has won Olympic crowns and Isthmian laurels; it confers kinship with men who have vindicated their divine right to be held in the world's memory."
CHAPTER XXIV. BOOKS AND SUCCESS.Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
—Shakespeare.
Prefer knowledge to wealth; for the one is transitory, the other perpetual. —Socrates.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. —Franklin.
My early and invincible love of reading, I would not exchange for the treasures of India. —Gibbon.
If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all. —Fénelon.
What he had been, had Cadmus never taught
The art that fixes into form the thought,—
Had Plato never spoken from his cell,
Or his high harp blind Homer never strung?
—Bulwer.
When friends grow cold and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and common-place, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope, nor deserted sorrow. —Washington Irving.
"Do you want to know," asks Robert Collyer, "how I manage to talk to you in this simple Saxon? I read Bunyan, Crusoe, and Goldsmith when I was a boy, morning, noon, and night. All the rest was task work; these were my delight, with the stories in the Bible, and with Shakespeare, when at last the mighty master came within our doors. The rest were as senna to me. These were like a well of pure water, and this is the first step I seem to have taken of my own free will toward the pulpit. * * * I took to these as I took to milk, and, without the least idea what I was doing, got the taste for simple words into the very fibre of my nature. There was day-school for me until I was eight years old, and then I had to turn in and work thirteen hours a day. * * * * From the days when we used to spell out Crusoe and old Bunyan there had grown up in me a devouring hunger to read books. It made small matter what they were, so they were books. Half a volume of an old encyclopædia came along—the first I had ever seen. How many times I went through that I cannot even guess. I remember that I read some old reports of the Missionary Society with the greatest delight.
"There were chapters in them about China and Labrador. Yet I think it is in reading, as it is in eating, when the first hunger is over you begin to be a little critical, and will by no means take to garbage if you are of a wholesome nature. And I remember this because it touches this beautiful valley of the Hudson. I could not go home for the Christmas of 1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for I was only a boy; and sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and said: 'I notice thou's fond of reading, so I brought thee summat to read.' It was Irving's 'Sketch Book.' I had never heard of the work. I went at it, and was 'as them that dream.' No such delight had touched me since the old days of Crusoe. I saw the Hudson and the Catskills, took poor Rip at once into my heart, as everybody has, pitied Ichabod while I laughed at him, thought the old Dutch feast a most admirable thing, and long before I was through, all regret at my lost Christmas had gone down with the wind, and I had found out there are books and books. That vast hunger to read never left me. If there was no candle, I poked my head down to the fire; read while I was eating, blowing the bellows, or walking from one place to another. I could read and walk four miles an hour. The world centred in books. There was no thought in my mind of any good to come out of it; the good lay in the reading. I had no more idea of being a minister than you elder men who were boys then, in this town, had that I should be here to-night to tell this story. Now, give a boy a passion like this for anything, books or business, painting or farming, mechanism or music, and you give him thereby a lever to lift his world, and a patent of nobility, if the thing he does is noble. There were two or three of my mind about books. We became companions, and gave the roughs a wide berth. The books did their work, too, about that drink, and fought the devil with a finer fire."
"In education," says Herbert Spencer, "the process of self-development should be encouraged to the fullest extent. Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction; and that to achieve the best results each mind must progress somewhat after the same fashion, is continually proved by the marked success of self-made men."
"My books," said Thomas Hood, "kept me from the ring, the dog-pit, the tavern, and the saloon. The associate of Pope and Addison, the mind accustomed to the noble though silent discourse of Shakespeare and Milton, will hardly seek or put up with low or evil company or slaves."
"When I get a little money," said Erasmus, "I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."
"Hundreds of books read once," says Robertson, "have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit."
"This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you," says Trollope, "is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasures that God has prepared for His creatures. Other pleasures may be more ecstatic; but the habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know, in which there is no alloy."
The Bible was begun in the desert in Arabia ages before Homer sang and flourished in Asia Minor. Millions of books have since gone into oblivion. Empires have risen and fallen. Revolutions have swept over and changed the earth. It has always been subject to
Comments (0)