奥里森·马登/Orison Marden
"I do not know how it is with others when speaking on an important question," said Henry Clay, "but on such occasions I seem to be unconscious of the external world. Wholly engrossed by the subject before me, I lose all sense of personal identity, of time, or of surrounding objects."
"A bank never becomes very successful," says a noted financier, "until it gets a president who takes it to bed with him."
"Men are nothing," exclaimed Montaigne, "until they are excited." As the young lover has finer sense and more acute vision and sees in the object of his affections a hundred virtues and charms invisible to all other eyes, so a man permeated with enthusiasm has his power of perception heightened and his vision magnified until he sees beauty and charms others cannot discern which compensate for drudgery, privations, hardships, and even persecution.
Dickens says he was haunted, possessed, spirit—driven by the plots and characters in his stories which would not let him sleep or rest until he had committed them to paper. On one sketch he shut himself up for a month, and when he came out he looked haggard as a murderer. His characters haunted him day and night.
"Herr Capellmeister, I should like to compose something; how shall I begin?" asked a youth of twelve, who had played with great skill on the piano.
"Pooh, Pooh;" replied Mozart, "you must wait."
"But you began when you were younger than I am," said the boy.
"Yes, so I did," said the great composer, "but I never asked anything about it. When one has the spirit of a composer, he writes because he can't help it."
Gladstone says that what is really wanted is to light up the spirit that is within a boy. In some sense and in some degree, in some effectual degree, there is in every boy the material of good work in the world; in every boy, not only in those who are brilliant, not only in those who are quick, but in those who are stolid, and even in those who are dull, or who seem to be dull. If they have only the good will, the dullness will day by day clear away, under the influence of the good will.