Wisdom & Empowerment: The Orison Swett Marden Edition (18 Books in One Volume). Orison Swett Marden

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СКАЧАТЬ action. Our latent strength must be developed steadily and persistently. All our reserves must be utilized, all our powers concentrated and wisely directed toward the accomplishment of the work we have marked out for ourselves.

      With eyes ever fixed on the ideal, we must work with heart and hand and brain; with a faith that never grows dim, with a resolution that never wavers, with a patience that is akin to genius, we must persevere unto the end; for, as we advance, our ideal as steadily moves upward.

      Everywhere we see people starving for love, famishing for affection, for some one to appreciate them.

      On every hand we see men and women possessing material comfort, luxury, all that can contribute to their physical well-being—who are able to gratify almost any wish—and yet they are hungry for love. They seem to have plenty of everything but affection. They have lands and houses, automobiles, yachts, horses, money—everything but love!

      Much of what goes by the name of love is only selfishness. Until love extends beyond the narrow circle of relatives and friends; until it stretches beyond the shores of one’s own land, it is not real love. The Christ-love is not that which nourishes and cares with greatest solicitude for one’s own child, and yet turns a deaf ear to the cry of the hungry and forsaken one in the street. Pure love is in the act, and does not take note of the object.

      When Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate Prison, in London, where the women were packed in one room like cattle, without the slightest attention to sanitation, she was much interested in a girl who had committed a terrible crime. One of the London ladies engaged in philanthropic work asked her what crime this girl had committed. “I do not know,” she replied. “I never asked her.”

      All she wanted to know was that this poor unfortunate had made a mistake, and that she needed love to heal the wound and help her to reform. It was not the wind or tempest the girl wanted, but the warm, gentle sunlight.

      I do not believe there is any human being, in prison or out, so depraved, so low, so bad, but that there is somebody in the world who could control him perfectly by love, by kindness, by patience.

      I have known women who had such charm of manner, such great loving, helpful hearts, that the worst men, the most hardened characters, would do anything in the world for them—would give up their lives, even, to protect them. But they could never be reformed, could never be touched by hatred or unkindness or compulsion. Love is the only power that could reach them.

      There is a man in New York City who has served, at different times, twenty-five years in state prison. He was one of the most hardened of criminals. No sooner would he get out of prison than he would begin to plan some burglary which would send him back again. The police all knew him.

      A great many people tried to help him, and many a time he got a position, only to lose it, because some one who knew him circulated the report that he was an ex-convict.

      He happened to fall under the influence of one of these sweet and noble women, who did not ask him what he was sent to prison for or to describe the crimes he had committed. She did not want to have anything to do with the bad part of him. She wanted to forget all that, and wanted him to forget it, too. She told him that he was not made for such business, that the Creator had given him that marvelously strong, keen brain of his for a great and noble purpose; that he was a success and happiness machine, so fearfully and wonderfully wrought that it had taken the Creator a quarter of a century to bring it to its perfection; that success and happiness were his birthright; that all he had to do was to claim them; that he had no right to look upon himself as a debased creature, but that he should hold perpetually in mind the thought of his divinity; that he was made by a per-feet Being and hence his better self must be perfect.

      She told him not to go about the streets trying to sneak and to slink out of sight, not to regard himself as a criminal, haunted and hunted by the police and detectives, but to say to himself, “I am a man, a strong, magnificent man, made in the image of Perfection. I must be perfect. There is an indestructible, inviolable something within me which must ultimately dominate my life and bring me into harmony.”

      The man faithfully followed the advice of his benefactress, and after a while he became so completely transformed that the hardened criminal lines, the sneaking fear lines in his face were replaced by signs of nobility. The uplifting suggestions constantly held in his mind outpictured themselves in his face and changed his expression to one of manhood.

      All this was the result of appealing to the best in the man, calling out the qualities which had been buried all those years, which had had no chance to grow, which had been smothered by the overdevelopment of the brute faculties.

      This pure, sweet woman called out of this man qualities which completely changed his life, and which a hundred years of punishment and cruelty and threatening and torture could never have developed.

      Forget yourself. You will never do anything great until you do. Self-consciousness is a disease with many. No matter what they do, they can never get away from themselves. They become warped upon the subject of self-analysis, wondering how they look, how they appear, what others will think of them, how they can enhance their own interests. In other words, every thought and every effort seems to focus upon self; nothing radiates from them.

      No one can grow while his thoughts are self-centered. The sympathies of the man who thinks only of himself are soon dried up. Self-consciousness acts as a paralysis to all expansion, strangles enlargement, kills aspiration, cripples executive ability. The mind which accomplishes things worth while looks out, not in; it is focused upon its object, not upon itself.

      The immortal acts have been unconsciously performed. The greatest prayers have been the silent longings, the secret yearnings of the heart, not those which have been delivered facing a critical audience. The daily desire is the perpetual prayer, the prayer that is heard and answered.

      The real test of a man’s success is his daily life. Does he really live? Is he alive in every part of his being, or have his best qualities shriveled and atrophied from disuse?

      What matters it how much money one has if there is only a small part of the real man alive; if his sympathies have dried up from the lack of use or cultivation, if his appreciation of the beautiful and his love of the good have become paralyzed?

      Is a man whose brain has developed one huge money gland for secreting dollars, while all his other faculties have died from disuse or neglect, a success? Have growth and the unfoldment of all the powers nothing to do with real success? Is living in a business rut for a quarter or a half century, grasping, elbowing one’s way, trampling upon others’ rights and opportunities, scheming to get something away from others, with indifference to their welfare, cherishing only one great, grasping motive—getting, getting, absorbing—is this real living? Is this character building?

      Is a huge tree trunk with all but one of the branches lopped off, and that one developed into an enormous monstrosity because of its having absorbed all of the sap intended for the other branches, a tree? Have symmetry, balance, and beauty nothing to do with a perfect tree? Most of us are at best monstrosities, with one faculty enormously over-developed at the expense of all the others. How rare it is to find a fully poised man, one with perfectly balanced development of faculty and function!

      The best legacy a man can leave his children is the memory and influence of a large, broad, finely developed mentality, a well disciplined, highly cultured mind, a sweet, beautiful character which has enriched everybody who came in contact with it, a refined personality, a magnanimous spirit.

      To leave a clean record, an untarnished name, a name which commanded respect for honesty and integrity which were above suspicion; this is a legacy worth while, a wealth beyond the reach of fire or СКАЧАТЬ