The Art of Public Speaking quotes

Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying.

You can never attain freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise.

A book may give you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle and be "half scared to death."

There are a great many "wetless" bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim in them.

To plunge is the only way.

Practise, practise, PRACTISE in speaking before an audience will tend to remove all fear of audiences, just as practise in swimming will lead to confidence and facility in the water. You must learn to speak by speaking.

Practise, practise, PRACTISE in speaking before an audience will tend to remove all fear of audiences, just as practise in swimming will lead to confidence and facility in the water.

You must learn to speak by speaking.

The Apostle Paul tells us that every man must work out his own salvation. All we can do here is to offer you suggestions as to how best to prepare for your plunge. The real plunge no one can take for you.

The Apostle Paul tells us that every man must work out his own salvation. All we can do here is to offer you suggestions as to how best to prepare for your plunge.

The real plunge no one can take for you.

A doctor may prescribe, but you must take the medicine.

Far worse than self-consciousness through fear of doing poorly is self-consciousness through assumption of doing well.

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great.

Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must "not look too good nor talk too wise."

The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great. Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must "not look too good nor talk too wise."

Nothing advertises itself so thoroughly as conceit. One may be so full of self as to be empty.

Voltaire said, "We must conceal self-love." But that can not be done. You know this to be true, for you have recognized overweening self-love in others. If you have it, others are seeing it in you.

Prepare yourself. Know what you are going to talk about, and, in general, how you are going to say it. Have the first few sentences worked out completely so that you may not be troubled in the beginning to find words.

Know your subject better than your hearers know it, and you have nothing to fear.

After Preparing for Success, Expect It

In the middle of his speech Irving hesitated, became embarrassed, and sat down awkwardly. Turning to a friend beside him he remarked, "There, I told you I would fail, and I did."

If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you. You will.

Rid yourself of this I-am-a-poor-worm-in-the-dust idea. You are a god, with infinite capabilities. "All things are ready if the mind be so." The eagle looks the cloudless sun in the face.

Do not make haste to begin—haste shows lack of control.

Do not apologize. It ought not to be necessary; and if it is, it will not help.

Go straight ahead.

You will not find it half so bad as you imagined; really, it is like taking a cold plunge: after you are in, the water is fine. In fact, having spoken a few times you will even anticipate the plunge with exhilaration.

To stand before an audience and make them think your thoughts after you is one of the greatest pleasures you can ever know.

Instead of fearing it, you ought to be as anxious as the fox hounds straining at their leashes, or the race horses tugging at their reins.

suppose Columbus had feared to venture out into the unknown West; suppose our forefathers had been too timid to oppose the tyranny of George the Third; suppose that any man who ever did anything worth while had been a coward!

The world owes its progress to the men who have dared, and you must dare to speak the effective word that is in your heart to speak—for often it requires courage to utter a single sentence.

But remember that men erect no monuments and weave no laurels for those who fear to do what they can.

If a speaker uses only a few of his powers, it points very plainly to the fact that the rest of his powers are not developed.

Monotony reveals our limitations.

In its effect on its victim, monotony is actually deadly—it will drive the bloom from the cheek and the lustre from the eye as quickly as sin, and often leads to viciousness.

but the poverty-stricken man must walk or take a street car—he does not have the choice of yacht, auto, or special train. He must spend the most of his life in labor and be content with the staples of the food-market.

Monotony is poverty, whether in speech or in life.

Strive to increase the variety of your speech as the business man labors to augment his wealth.

We cannot impress too thoroughly upon you the necessity for a real working mastery of these principles. They are the very foundations of successful speaking. "Get your principles right," said Napoleon, "and the rest is a matter of detail."

It is useless to shoe a dead horse, and all the sound principles in Christendom will never make a live speech out of a dead one.

So let it be understood that public speaking is not a matter of mastering a few dead rules; the most important law of public speech is the necessity for truth, force, feeling, and life. Forget all else, but not this.

Let us not confound loudness with emphasis.

To yell is not a sign of earnestness, intelligence, or feeling.

The kind of force that we want applied to the emphatic word is not entirely physical. True, the emphatic word may be spoken more loudly, or it may be spoken more softly, but the real quality desired is intensity, earnestness.

What would you think of a guide who agreed to show New York to a stranger and then took up his time by visiting Chinese laundries and boot-blacking "parlors" on the side streets?

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: He must have either truth or entertainment for them.

If he wearies their attention with trifles they will have neither vivacity nor desire left when he reaches words of Wall-Street and skyscraper importance. You do not dwell on these small words in your everyday conversation, because you are not a conversational bore.

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear.

Worry is rust upon the blade.

It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery but the friction.—Henry Ward Beecher.

There, by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day THE WHEAT LOCKS THE SUNSHINE IN ITS BEARDED SHEAF.

In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains.

THERE ARE MOUNTAINS STORED WITH EXHAUSTLESS TREASURES: forests—vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wood—that region has easy control.

—John Franklin Genung, The Working Principles of Rhetoric.

Pause, in public speech, is not mere silence—it is silence made designedly eloquent.

When a man says: "I-uh-it is with profound-ah-pleasure that-er-I have been permitted to speak to you tonight and-uh-uh-I should say-er"—that is not pausing; that is stumbling. It is conceivable that a speaker may be effective in spite of stumbling—but never because of it.

You can light a match by holding it beneath a lens and concentrating the sun's rays. You would not expect the match to flame if you jerked the lens back and forth quickly. Pause, and the lens gathers the heat.

Your thoughts will not set fire to the minds of your hearers unless you pause to gather the force that comes by a second or two of concentration.

Maple trees and gas wells are rarely tapped continually; when a stronger flow is wanted, a pause is made, nature has time to gather her reserve forces, and when the tree or the well is reopened, a stronger flow is the result.

Carlyle was right: "Speak not, I passionately entreat thee, till thy thought has silently matured itself. Out of silence comes thy strength. Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; Speech is human, Silence is divine."

Silence has been called the father of speech. It should be. Too many of our public speeches have no fathers.

They ramble along without pause or break. Like Tennyson's brook, they run on forever. Listen to little children, the policeman on the corner, the family conversation around the table, and see how many pauses they naturally use, for they are unconscious of effects.

One night when he hesitated and had to be coaxed and worked with a long time before he would perform his feat he got a great deal more applause than when he did his trick at once.

We not only like to wait but we appreciate what we wait for.

If fish bite too readily the sport soon ceases to be a sport.

If you hasten by your important points without pausing, your audience will have just about as adequate an idea of what you have tried to convey.

Take time, you have just as much of it as our richest multimillionaire.

Your audience will wait for you. It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The great redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five hundred years before Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are only in their prime today.

Your audience will wait for you. It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The great redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five hundred years before Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are only in their prime today.

Nature shames us with our petty haste.

Silence is one of the most eloquent things in the world. Master it, and use it through pause.

It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The great redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five hundred years before Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are only in their prime today. Nature shames us with our petty haste.

Silence is one of the most eloquent things in the world.

Master it, and use it through pause.

it is largely a matter of personal preference. A dozen great actors have played Hamlet well, and yet each has played the part differently. Which comes the nearest to perfection is a question of opinion.

You will succeed best by daring to follow your own course—if you are individual enough to blaze an original trail.

A moment's halt—a momentary taste of being from the well amid the waste—and lo! the phantom caravan has reached—the nothing it set out from—Oh make haste!

You will note that the punctuation marks have nothing to do with the pausing. You may run by a period very quickly and make a long pause where there is no kind of punctuation.

Thought is greater than punctuation. It must guide you in your pauses.

A book of verses underneath the bough,—a jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou beside me singing in the wilderness—Oh—wilderness were paradise enow.

The change of pitch within a word is even more important, because more delicate, than the change of pitch from phrase to phrase. Indeed, one cannot be practised without the other.

The bare words are only so many bricks—inflection will make of them a pavement, a garage, or a cathedral.

It is the power of inflection to change the meaning of words that gave birth to the old saying: "It is not so much what you say, as how you say it."

Every evening since the ship left Vancouver he has presided over the round table in the middle of the smoking-room. There he sips his coffee and liqueur, and holds forth on every subject known to the mind of man.

Each subject is his subject.

He is an elderly person, with a bad face and a drooping left eyelid.

You cannot deliver a broadside without concentrated force—that is what produces the explosion. In preparation you store and concentrate thought and feeling; in the pauses during delivery you swiftly look ahead and gather yourself for effective attack; during the moments of actual speech, SPEAK—DON'T ANTICIPATE.

Divide your attention and you divide your power.

This matter of the effect of the inner man upon the outer needs a further word here, particularly as touching concentration.

If the thought beneath your words is warm, fresh, spontaneous, a part of your self, your utterance will have breath and life.

Words are only a result. Do not try to get the result without stimulating the cause.

Do you ask how to concentrate? Think of the word itself, and of its philological brother, concentric. Think of how a lens gathers and concenters the rays of light within a given circle. It centers them by a process of withdrawal.

7. Read the following selection through to get its meaning and spirit clearly in your mind. Then read it aloud, concentrating solely on the thought that you are expressing—do not trouble about the sentence or thought that is coming.

Half the troubles of mankind arise from anticipating trials that never occur.

Avoid this in speaking. Make the end of your sentences just as strong as the beginning. CONCENTRATE.

You must be convinced of the truth, or the importance, or the meaning, of what you are about to say before you can give it forceful delivery. It must lay strong hold upon your convictions before it can grip your audience.

Conviction convinces.

The Saturday Evening Post in an article on "England's T.R."—Winston Spencer Churchill—attributed much of Churchill's and Roosevelt's public platform success to their forceful delivery.

and that keeps an audience alert, hanging on the lips of a speaker for his next word. After all, it is all a question of manhood, for a stuffed doll has neither convictions nor emotional tension.

If you are upholstered with sawdust, keep off the platform, for your own speech will puncture you.

Growing out of this conviction-tension comes resolve to make the audience share that conviction-tension. Purpose is the backbone of force; without it speech is flabby—it may glitter, but it is the iridescence of the spineless jellyfish.

Growing out of this conviction-tension comes resolve to make the audience share that conviction-tension.

Purpose is the backbone of force; without it speech is flabby—it may glitter, but it is the iridescence of the spineless jellyfish.

You must hold fast to your resolve if you would hold fast to your audience.

However skillfully your engine is constructed, however well it works, you will have no force if the fire has gone out under the boiler. It matters little how well you have mastered poise, pause, modulation, and tempo, if your speech lacks fire it is dead.

Neither a dead engine nor a dead speech will move anybody.

Four factors of force are measurably within your control, and in that far may be acquired: ideas, feeling about the subject, wording, and delivery.

You can not deliver an aggressive message with caressing little strokes. No! Jab it in with hard, swift solar plexus punches.

You cannot strike fire from flint or from an audience with love taps.

Say to a crowded theatre in a lackadaisical manner: "It seems to me that the house is on fire," and your announcement may be greeted with a laugh. If you flash out the words: "The house's on fire!"

Deliver them with the iron hand and confidence of a Cromwell. Assert them with the fire of authority. Pronounce them as an ultimatum.

If you cannot speak with conviction, be silent.

What force did that young minister have who, fearing to be too dogmatic, thus exhorted his hearers:

Omit the thunder of delivery, if you will, but like Wendell Phillips put "silent lightning" into your speech.

Make your thoughts breathe and your words burn.

Birrell said: "Emerson writes like an electrical cat emitting sparks and shocks in every sentence." Go thou and speak likewise. Get the "big stick" into your delivery—be forceful.

feeling. The great speeches of the world have not been delivered on tariff reductions or post-office appropriations. The speeches that will live have been charged with emotional force.

Prosperity and peace are poor developers of eloquence.

When great wrongs are to be righted, when the public heart is flaming with passion, that is the occasion for memorable speaking. Patrick Henry made an immortal address, for in an epochal crisis he pleaded for liberty.

Listen! Emerson said: "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Carlyle declared that "Every great movement in the annals of history has been the triumph of enthusiasm."

It is as contagious as measles.

Eloquence is half inspiration. Sweep your audience with you in a pulsation of enthusiasm. Let yourself go. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going."

But we must not look upon the foregoing words as a facile prescription for decocting a feeling which may then be ladled out to a complacent audience in quantities to suit the need of the moment.

Genuine feeling in a speech is bone and blood of the speech itself and not something that may be added to it or substracted at will.

In the ideal address theme, speaker and audience become one, fused by the emotion and thought of the hour.

instances, Paul's address to the Athenians on Mars Hill, Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, The Sermon on the Mount, Henry's address before the Virginia Convention of Delegates.

The seal and sign of greatness is a desire to serve others.

Self-preservation is the first law of life, but self-abnegation is the first law of greatness—and of art. Selfishness is the fundamental cause of all sin, it is the thing that all great religions, all worthy philosophies, have struck at.

Do not let your words say one thing, and your voice and attitude another. There is no room here for half-hearted, nonchalant methods of delivery.

Sincerity is the very soul of eloquence.

Carlyle was right: "No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere man.

Proper friendships form one of the best means for the formation of ideas and ideals, for they enable one to practise in giving expression to thought. The speaker who would speak fluently before an audience should learn to speak fluently and entertainingly with a friend.

Clarify your ideas by putting them in words; the talker gains as much from his conversation as the listener.

You sometimes begin to converse on a subject thinking you have very little to say, but one idea gives birth to another, and you are surprised to learn that the more you give the more you have to give.

But this means work. What good habit does not?

No philosopher's stone that will act as a substitute for laborious practise has ever been found.

If it were, it would be thrown away, because it would kill our greatest joy—the delight of acquisition. If public-speaking means to you a fuller life, you will know no greater happiness than a well-spoken speech.

In practising voice exercises, and in speaking, never force your tones. Ease must be your watchword.

The voice is a delicate instrument, and you must not handle it with hammer and tongs.

Don't make your voice go—let it go. Don't work. Let the yoke of speech be easy and its burden light.

This quality is sometimes destroyed by wasting the breath. Carefully control the breath, using only as much as is necessary for the production of tone. Utilize all that you give out. Failure to do this results in a breathy tone.

Take in breath like a prodigal; in speaking, give it out like a miser.

Never attempt to force your voice when hoarse.

Henry Ward Beecher said the happiest days of his life were not when he had become an international character, but when he was an unknown minister out in Lawrenceville, Ohio, sweeping his own church, and working as a carpenter to help pay the grocer.

Happiness is largely an attitude of mind, of viewing life from the right angle.

The optimistic attitude can be cultivated, and it will express itself in voice charm. A telephone company recently placarded this motto in their booths: "The Voice with the Smile Wins." It does. Try it.

After these ends have been attained to your satisfaction, carefully review the principles of public speaking laid down in the preceding chapters and put them into practise as you read these passages again and again. It would be better to commit each selection to memory.

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.

The lonely pine upon the mountain-top waves its sombre boughs, and cries, "Thou art my sun." And the little meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, "Thou art my sun."

If you want to possess voice charm, cultivate a deep, sincere sympathy for mankind. Love will shine out through your eyes and proclaim itself in your tones. One secret of the sweetness of the canary's song may be his freedom from tainted thoughts.

Your character beautifies or mars your voice. As a man thinketh in his heart so is his voice.

1. Define (a) charm; (b) joy; (c) beauty.

Gesture is really a simple matter that requires observation and common sense rather than a book of rules.

Gesture is an outward expression of an inward condition.

It is merely an effect—the effect of a mental or an emotional impulse struggling for expression through physical avenues.

It will not in the least help matters to tack on to your delivery a few mechanical movements. If the tree in your front yard is not growing to suit you, fertilize and water the soil and let the tree have sunshine.

Obviously it will not help your tree to nail on a few branches.

If your cistern is dry, wait until it rains; or bore a well. Why plunge a pump into a dry hole?

He may tack on some movements, but they will look like the wilted branches nailed to a tree to simulate life.

Gestures must be born, not built. A wooden horse may amuse the children, but it takes a live one to go somewhere.

It is not only impossible to lay down definite rules on this subject, but it would be silly to try, for everything depends on the speech, the occasion, the personality and feelings of the speaker, and the attitude of the audience.

Have you ever seen a speaker use such grotesque gesticulations that you were fascinated by their frenzy of oddity, but could not follow his thought?

Do not smother ideas with gymnastics.

Savonarola would rush down from the high pulpit among the congregation in the duomo at Florence and carry the fire of conviction to his hearers; Billy Sunday slides to base on the platform carpet in dramatizing one of his baseball illustrations.

There is a place for a unique style of walking—it is the circus or the cake-walk; there is a place for surprisingly rhythmical evolutions of arms and legs—it is on the dance floor or the stage.

Don't let your agility and grace put your thoughts out of business.

One of the present writers took his first lessons in gesture from a certain college president who knew far more about what had happened at the Diet of Worms than he did about how to express himself in action.

His instructions were to start the movement on a certain word, continue it on a precise curve, and unfold the fingers at the conclusion, ending with the forefinger—just so. Plenty, and more than plenty, has been published on this subject, giving just such silly directions.

Gesture is a thing of mentality and feeling—not a matter of geometry.

Remember, whenever a pair of shoes, a method of pronunciation, or a gesture calls attention to itself, it is bad. When you have made really good gestures in a good speech your hearers will not go away saying, "What beautiful gestures he made!"

and doubtless the first time they were used they came in a burst of spontaneous feeling, yet Whitefield declared that not until he had delivered a sermon forty times was its delivery perfected.

What spontaneity initiates let practise complete.

Every effective speaker and every vivid actor has observed, considered and practised gesture until his dramatic actions are a sub-conscious possession, just like his ability to pronounce correctly without especially concentrating his thought.

Practise descriptive, suggestive, and typical movements until they come as naturally as a good articulation; and rarely forecast the gestures you will use at a given moment: leave something to that moment.

Roast beef is an excellent dish, but it would be terrible as an exclusive diet.

No matter how effective one gesture is, do not overwork it. Put variety in your actions. Monotony will destroy all beauty and power. The pump handle makes one effective gesture, and on hot days that one is very eloquent, but it has its limitations.

Do not forget that.

Restlessness is not expression.

A great many useless movements will only take the attention of the audience from what you are saying. A widely-noted man introduced the speaker of the evening one Sunday lately to a New York audience.

The man who sits in a dejected heap with a look of despair on his face is expressing his thoughts and feelings just as effectively as the man who is waving his arms and shouting from the back of a dray wagon.

The eye has been called the window of the soul. Through it shines the light of our thoughts and feelings.

Do Not Use Too Much Gesture

It is impossible for anyone—even yourself—to criticise your gestures until after they are made.

You can't prune a peach tree until it comes up; therefore speak much, and observe your own speech.

While you are examining yourself, do not forget to study statuary and paintings to see how the great portrayers of nature have made their subjects express ideas through action. Notice the gestures of the best speakers and actors. Observe the physical expression of life everywhere.

However, it is worth while warning you not to be lenient in self-exaction. Say to yourself courageously: What others can do, I can attempt.

A bold spirit conquers where others flinch, and a trying task challenges pluck.

This method really deserves short shrift in a book on public speaking, for, delude yourself as you may, public reading is not public speaking.

1. Laziness is the commonest. Enough said.

Even Heaven cannot make a lazy man efficient.

2. A memory so defective that he really cannot speak without reading. Alas, he is not speaking when he is reading, so his dilemma is painful—and not to himself alone.

Alas, he is not speaking when he is reading, so his dilemma is painful—and not to himself alone. But no man has a right to assume that his memory is utterly bad until he has buckled down to memory culture—and failed.

A weak memory is oftener an excuse than a reason.

3. A genuine lack of time to do more than write the speech. There are such instances—but they do not occur every week! The disposition of your time allows more flexibility than you realize. Motive 3 too often harnesses up with Motive 1.

Gibbon consumed twenty years gathering material for and rewriting the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Although you cannot devote such painstaking preparation to a speech, you should take time to eliminate useless words, crowd whole paragraphs into a sentence and choose proper illustrations.

Good speeches, like plays, are not written; they are rewritten.

The National Cash Register Company follows this plan with their most efficient selling organization: they require their salesmen to memorize verbatim a selling talk.

On the contrary, to speak well without notes requires all the preparation which we discussed so fully in the chapter on "Fluency," while yet relying upon the "inspiration of the hour" for some of your thoughts and much of your language.

You had better remember, however, that the most effective inspiration of the hour is the inspiration you yourself bring to it, bottled up in your spirit and ready to infuse itself into the audience.

If you extemporize you can get much closer to your audience. In a sense, they appreciate the task you have before you and send out their sympathy.

General Grant's words as president were more powerful than his words as a Missouri farmer. If you would appear in the light of an authority, be one.

Make notes on your brain instead of on paper.

A modification of the second method has been adopted by many great speakers, particularly lecturers who are compelled to speak on a wide variety of subjects day after day;

At this stage, pay more attention to manner than to matter—the succeeding chapters take up the composition of the address. Be particularly insistent upon frequent and thorough review of the principles of delivery discussed in the preceding chapters.

Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.

So mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed, And sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be!

An empty mind, like an empty larder, may be a serious matter or not—all will depend on the available resources. If there is no food in the cupboard the housewife does not nervously rattle the empty dishes; she telephones the grocer.

If you have no ideas, do not rattle your empty ers and ahs, but get some ideas, and don't speak until you do get them.

This, however, is not being what the old New England housekeeper used to call "forehanded." The real solution of the problem of what to do with an empty head is never to let it become empty.

In the artesian wells of Dakota the water rushes to the surface and leaps a score of feet above the ground. The secret of this exuberant flow is of course the great supply below, crowding to get out.

What is the use of stopping to prime a mental pump when you can fill your life with the resources for an artesian well?

It is not enough to have merely enough; you must have more than enough. Then the pressure of your mass of thought and feeling will maintain your flow of speech and give you the confidence and poise that denote reserve power.

Byron says of John Locke that 'all his knowledge of the human understanding was derived from studying his own mind.' Since multiform nature is all about us, originality ought not to be so rare."[8]

Thinking is doing mental arithmetic with facts.

Add this fact to that and you reach a certain conclusion. Subtract this truth from another and you have a definite result. Multiply this fact by another and have a precise product.

Take one link at a time, see that each naturally belongs with the ones you link to it, and remember that a single missing link means no chain.

Thinking is the most fascinating and exhilarating of all mental exercises.

Once realize that your opinion on a subject does not represent the choice you have made between what Dr.

And when books have related us to our own age, and related all the epochs to God, whose providence is the gulf stream of history, these teachers go on to stimulate us to new and greater achievements.

Alone, man is an unlighted candle. The mind needs some book to kindle its faculties.

Before Byron began to write he used to give half an hour to reading some favorite passage. The thought of some great writer never failed to kindle Byron into a creative glow, even as a match lights the kindlings upon the grate.

The thought of some great writer never failed to kindle Byron into a creative glow, even as a match lights the kindlings upon the grate. In these burning, luminous moods Byron's mind did its best work.

The true book stimulates the mind as no wine can ever quicken the blood.

It is reading that brings us to our best, and rouses each faculty to its most vigorous life.

When you have not the advantage of the test of time by which to judge books, investigate as thoroughly as possible the authority of the books you read.

Much that is printed and passes current is counterfeit.

"I read it in a book" is to many a sufficient warranty of truth, but not to the thinker. "What book?" asks the careful mind. "Who wrote it? What does he know about the subject and what right has he to speak on it?

Such reading must be alive with fresh points of view, packed with special knowledge, and deal with subjects of vital interest. Do not confine your reading to what you already know you will agree with.

Opposition wakes one up.

The other road may be the better, but you will never know it unless you "give it the once over." Do not do all your thinking and investigating in front of given "Q.E.D.'s;"

Look to this day, for it is life—the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence: the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty.

For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day. Such is the salutation of the dawn.

Let no word of this, however, seem to decry the value of recreation. Nothing is more vital to a worker than rest—yet nothing is so vitiating to the shirker.

Be sure that your recreation re-creates.

A pause in the midst of labors gathers strength for new effort. The mistake is to pause too long, or to fill your pauses with ideas that make life flabby.

There is no need to overstep time-limits if you make your preparation adequate and divide your subject so as to give each thought its due proportion of attention—and no more.

Blessed is the man that maketh short speeches, for he shall be invited to speak again.

Another matter of prime importance is, what part of your address demands the most emphasis.

Live an active life among people who are doing worth-while things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them.

The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.

How to Use a Library

To be sure, this note-book habit means labor, but remember that more speeches have been spoiled by half-hearted preparation than by lack of talent.

Laziness is an own-brother to Over-confidence, and both are your inveterate enemies, though they pretend to be soothing friends.

Conserve your material by indexing every good idea on cards, thus:

Like other valuable resources in public speaking, description loses its power when carried to an extreme. Over-ornamentation makes the subject ridiculous.

A dust-cloth is a very useful thing, but why embroider it?

Whether description shall be restrained within its proper and important limits, or be encouraged to run riot, is the personal choice that comes before every speaker, for man's earliest literary tendency is to depict.

Be sure of your mood, too, for it will color the subject to be described.

Melancholy will make a rose-garden look gray.

Adopt an order in which you will proceed—do not shift backward and forward from near to far, remote to close in time, general to particular, large to small, important to unimportant, concrete to abstract, physical to mental; but follow your chosen order.

[23] This figure of speech is known as "Vision."

The art of narration is the art of writing in hooks and eyes.

The principle consists in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to come, and then letting it come.—Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies.

An anecdote is a short narrative of a single event, told as being striking enough to bring out a point.

The keener the point, the more condensed the form, and the more suddenly the application strikes the hearer, the better the story.

To regard an anecdote as an illustration—an interpretive picture—will help to hold us to its true purpose, for a purposeless story is of all offenses on the platform the most asinine.

To regard an anecdote as an illustration—an interpretive picture—will help to hold us to its true purpose, for a purposeless story is of all offenses on the platform the most asinine.

A perfectly capital joke will fall flat when it is dragged in by the nape without evident bearing on the subject under discussion.

On the other hand, an apposite anecdote has saved many a speech from failure.

Most of our opinions and actions are not based upon conscious reasoning, but are the result of suggestion. In fact, some authorities declare that an act of pure reasoning is very rare in the average mind.

Momentous decisions are made, far-reaching actions are determined upon, primarily by the force of suggestion.

Notice that word "primarily," for simple thought, and even mature reasoning, often follows a suggestion accepted in the mind, and the thinker fondly supposes that his conclusion is from first to last based on cold logic.

A second important principle is that our feelings, thoughts and wills tend to follow the line of least resistance. Once open the mind to the sway of one feeling and it requires a greater power of feeling, thought, or will—or even all three—to unseat it.

Our feelings influence our judgments and volitions much more than we care to admit.

So true is this that it is a superhuman task to get an audience to reason fairly on a subject on which it feels deeply, and when this result is accomplished the success becomes noteworthy, as in the case of Henry Ward Beecher's Liverpool speech.

To warn children that they should not put beans up their noses is the surest method of getting them to do it. Every thought called up in the mind of your audience will work either for or against you.

Thoughts are not dead matter; they radiate dynamic energy—the thoughts all tend to pass into action.

"Thought is another name for fate." Dominate your hearers' thoughts, allay all contradictory ideas, and you will sway them as you wish.

Whether the speaker finds it already in the warm, expectant look of his hearers, or must win to it against opposition or coldness, he must gain that one great vantage point before his suggestions take on power in the hearts of his listeners.

Confidence is the mother of Conviction.

Note in the opening of Henry W. Grady's after-dinner speech how he attempted to secure the confidence of his audience. He created a receptive atmosphere by a humorous story; expressed his desire to speak with earnestness and sincerity; acknowledged "the vast interests involved;"

To secure confidence, be confident. How can you expect others to accept a message in which you lack, or seem to lack, faith yourself?

Confidence is as contagious as disease.

Napoleon rebuked an officer for using the word "impossible" in his presence. The speaker who will entertain no idea of defeat begets in his hearers the idea of his victory.

Ignorance and credulity will remain unchanged unless the suggestion of authority be followed promptly by facts.

Don't claim authority unless you carry your license in your pocket.

Let reason support the position that suggestion has assumed.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Eloquence.

More good and more ill have been effected by persuasion than by any other form of speech.

It is an attempt to influence by means of appeal to some particular interest held important by the hearer. Its motive may be high or low, fair or unfair, honest or dishonest, calm or passionate, and hence its scope is unparalleled in public speaking.

How could I have written songs of hate without hatred?" Neither is it possible to plead with full efficiency for a cause for which you do not feel deeply.

Feeling is contagious as belief is contagious.

The speaker who pleads with real feeling for his own convictions will instill his feelings into his listeners. Sincerity, force, enthusiasm, and above all, feeling—these are the qualities that move multitudes and make appeals irresistible.

Sincerity, force, enthusiasm, and above all, feeling—these are the qualities that move multitudes and make appeals irresistible. They are of far greater importance than technical principles of delivery, grace of gesture, or polished enunciation—important as all these elements must doubtless be considered.

Base your appeal on reason, but do not end in the basement—let the building rise, full of deep emotion and noble persuasion.

1. (a) What elements of appeal do you find in the following? (b) Is it too florid? (c) Is this style equally powerful today? (d) Are the sentences too long and involved for clearness and force?

The psychology of the crowd is far different from the psychology of the personal members that compose it. The crowd is a distinct entity. Individuals restrain and subdue many of their impulses at the dictates of reason.

The crowd never reasons. It only feels.

As persons there is a sense of responsibility attached to our actions which checks many of our incitements, but the sense of responsibility is lost in the crowd because of its numbers.

Even the most dignified speaker must recognize the eternal laws of human nature. You are by no means urged to become a trickster on the platform—far from it!—but don't kill your speech with dignity.

To be icily correct is as silly as to rant.

Do neither, but appeal to those world-old elements in your audience that have been recognized by all great speakers from Demosthenes to Sam Small, and see to it that you never debase your powers by arousing your hearers unworthily.

Do neither, but appeal to those world-old elements in your audience that have been recognized by all great speakers from Demosthenes to Sam Small, and see to it that you never debase your powers by arousing your hearers unworthily.

It is as hard to kindle enthusiasm in a scattered audience as to build a fire with scattered sticks.

An audience to be converted into a crowd must be made to appear as a crowd. This cannot be done when they are widely scattered over a large seating space or when many empty benches separate the speaker from his hearers.

Let us not seek for a definition, for a score of varying ones may be found, but let us grasp this fact: By imagination we mean either the faculty or the process of forming mental images.

The subject-matter of imagination may be really existent in nature, or not at all real, or a combination of both; it may be physical or spiritual, or both—the mental image is at once the most lawless and the most law-abiding child that has ever been born of the mind.

First of all, as its name suggests, the process of imagination—for we are thinking of it now as a process rather than as a faculty—is memory at work. Therefore we must consider it primarily as

(f) The tactile image, to name no others, is well nigh as potent. Do you shudder at the thought of velvet rubbed by short-nailed finger tips? Or were you ever "burned" by touching an ice-cold stove?

Or, happier memory, can you still feel the touch of a well-loved absent hand?

Be it remembered that few of these images are present in our minds except in combination—the sight and sound of the crashing avalanche are one; so are the flash and report of the huntman's gun that came so near "doing for us."

And just here the fictionist, the poet, and the public speaker will see the value of productive imagery.

True, the feet of the idol you build are on the ground, but its head pierces the clouds, it is a son of both earth and heaven.

One fact it is important to note here: Imagery is a valuable mental asset in proportion as it is controlled by the higher intellectual power of pure reason. The untutored child of nature thinks largely in images and therefore attaches to them undue importance.

He readily confuses the real with the unreal—to him they are of like value. But the man of training readily distinguishes the one from the other and evaluates each with some, if not with perfect, justice.

So we see that unrestrained imaging may produce a rudderless steamer, while the trained faculty is the graceful sloop, skimming the seas at her skipper's will, her course steadied by the helm of reason and her lightsome wings catching every air of heaven.

The game of chess, the war-lord's tactical plan, the evolution of a geometrical theorem, the devising of a great business campaign, the elimination of waste in a factory, the dénouement of a powerful drama, the overcoming of an economic obstacle, the scheme for a sublime …

… of an economic obstacle, the scheme for a sublime poem, and the convincing siege of an audience may—nay, indeed must—each be conceived in an image and wrought to reality according to the plans and specifications laid upon the trestle board by some modern imaginative Hiram.

The farmer who would be content with the seed he possesses would have no harvest.

Do not rest satisfied with the ability to recall images, but cultivate your creative imagination by building "what might be" upon the foundation of "what is."

The farmer who would be content with the seed he possesses would have no harvest.

Do not rest satisfied with the ability to recall images, but cultivate your creative imagination by building "what might be" upon the foundation of "what is."

By this time you will have already made some general application of these ideas to the art of the platform, but to several specific uses we must now refer.

(c) Image the language you will use, so far as written or extemporaneous speech may dictate. The habit of imaging will give you choice of varied figures of speech, for remember that an address without fresh comparisons is like a garden without blooms.

Do not be content with the first hackneyed figure that comes flowing to your pen-point, but dream on until the striking, the unusual, yet the vividly real comparison points your thought like steel does the arrow-tip.

Note the freshness and effectiveness of the following description from the opening of O. Henry's story, "The Harbinger."

But these be mere externals.

The true harbinger is the heart.

When Strephon seeks his Chloe and Mike his Maggie, then only is Spring arrived and the newspaper report of the five foot rattler killed in Squire Pettregrew's pasture confirmed.

After practising on reproductive imaging, turn to the productive, beginning with the reproductive and adding productive features for the sake of cultivating invention.

Frequently, allow your originating gifts full swing by weaving complete imaginary fabrics—sights, sounds, scenes; all the fine world of fantasy lies open to the journeyings of your winged steed.

In like manner train yourself in the use of figurative language. Learn first to distinguish and then to use its varied forms. When used with restraint, nothing can be more effective than the trope;

In like manner train yourself in the use of figurative language. Learn first to distinguish and then to use its varied forms.

When used with restraint, nothing can be more effective than the trope; but once let extravagance creep in by the window, and power will flee by the door.

All in all, master your images—let not them master you.

Learn first to distinguish and then to use its varied forms. When used with restraint, nothing can be more effective than the trope; but once let extravagance creep in by the window, and power will flee by the door.

All in all, master your images—let not them master you.

1. Give original examples of each kind of reproductive imagination.

We have in mind a speaker of superior attainments who acquired his vocabulary by noting all new words he heard or read. These he mastered and put into use. Soon his vocabulary became large, varied, and exact.

Use a new word accurately five times and it is yours.

Professor Albert E. Hancock says: "An author's vocabulary is of two kinds, latent and dynamic: latent—those words he understands; dynamic—those he can readily use. Every intelligent man knows all the words he needs, but he may not have them all ready for active service.

It is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student's reach, his inimitable model.

Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is an old and very true saying that failure is the only highroad to success.

Do not be content with your general knowledge of a word—press your study until you have mastered its individual shades of meaning and usage. Mere fluency is sure to become despicable, but accuracy never. The dictionary contains the crystallized usage of intellectual giants.

Do not be content with your general knowledge of a word—press your study until you have mastered its individual shades of meaning and usage.

Mere fluency is sure to become despicable, but accuracy never.

The dictionary contains the crystallized usage of intellectual giants. No one who would write effectively dare despise its definitions and discriminations. Think, for example, of the different meanings of mantle, or model, or quantity.

… the language of the platform follows closely the diction of everyday speech, many useful words may be acquired in conversation with cultivated men, and when such discussion takes the form of disputation as to the meanings and usages of words, it will prove doubly valuable.

The development of word-power marches with the growth of individuality.

Search Faithfully for the Right Word

Search Faithfully for the Right Word

Books of reference are tripled in value when their owner has a passion for getting the kernels out of their shells.

Ten minutes a day will do wonders for the nut-cracker. "I am growing so peevish about my writing," says Flaubert. "I am like a man whose ear is true, but who plays falsely on the violin:

Yes, stuck is the right expression, as his chagrined teacher had to admit when the boy was cross-examined. He had not been "up to some of his tricks;" he had stuck, and his explanations, as you will admit, merely emphasized his incapacity.

He had brought himself to public scorn for lack of a word.

What word? they asked testily; but even now he could not tell. He had wanted a Scotch word that would signify how many people were in church, and it was on the tip of his tongue, but would come no farther.

—Samuel Rogers, Pleasures of Memory.

Many an orator, like Thackeray, has made the best part of his speech to himself—on the way home from the lecture hall.

Presence of mind—it remained for Mark Twain to observe—is greatly promoted by absence of body. A hole in the memory is no less a common complaint than a distressing one.

Many an orator, like Thackeray, has made the best part of his speech to himself—on the way home from the lecture hall.

Presence of mind—it remained for Mark Twain to observe—is greatly promoted by absence of body.

A hole in the memory is no less a common complaint than a distressing one.

Many an orator, like Thackeray, has made the best part of his speech to himself—on the way home from the lecture hall. Presence of mind—it remained for Mark Twain to observe—is greatly promoted by absence of body.

A hole in the memory is no less a common complaint than a distressing one.

Henry Ward Beecher was able to deliver one of the world's greatest addresses at Liverpool because of his excellent memory. In speaking of the occasion Mr.

Berol's remarkable memory was natural and required only attention, for its development, seems impossible to determine with exactness, but the evidence clearly indicates that, however useless were many of his memory feats, a highly retentive memory was developed where before only "a good forgettery" existed.

The freak memory is not worth striving for, but a good working memory decidedly is.

Your power as a speaker will depend to a large extent upon your ability to retain impressions and call them forth when occasion demands, and that sort of memory is like muscle—it responds to training.

Your power as a speaker will depend to a large extent upon your ability to retain impressions and call them forth when occasion demands, and that sort of memory is like muscle—it responds to training.

It is sheer misdirected effort to begin to memorize by learning words by rote, for that is beginning to build a pyramid at the apex.

For years our schools were cursed by this vicious system—vicious not only because it is inefficient but for the more important reason that it hurts the mind.

a mind charged with an idea is charged to a degree sufficient to hold it. Too much charging will make the siphon burst; too much attention to trifles leads to insanity.

Adequate attention, then, is the fundamental secret of remembering.

Generally we do not give a fact adequate attention when it does not seem important. Almost everyone has seen how the seeds in an apple point, and has memorized the date of Washington's death. Most of us have—perhaps wisely—forgotten both.

Most of us have—perhaps wisely—forgotten both. The little nick in the bark of a tree is healed over and obliterated in a season, but the gashes in the trees around Gettysburg are still apparent after fifty years.

Impressions that are gathered lightly are soon obliterated.

Only deep impressions can be recalled at will. Henry Ward Beecher said: "One intense hour will do more than dreamy years."

Most of us have—perhaps wisely—forgotten both. The little nick in the bark of a tree is healed over and obliterated in a season, but the gashes in the trees around Gettysburg are still apparent after fifty years. Impressions that are gathered lightly are soon obliterated.

Only deep impressions can be recalled at will.

Henry Ward Beecher said: "One intense hour will do more than dreamy years." To memorize ideas and words, concentrate on them until they are fixed firmly and deeply in your mind and accord to them their true importance.

Henry Ward Beecher said: "One intense hour will do more than dreamy years." To memorize ideas and words, concentrate on them until they are fixed firmly and deeply in your mind and accord to them their true importance.

Listen with the mind and you will remember.

How shall you concentrate? How would you increase the fighting-effectiveness of a man-of-war? One vital way would be to increase the size and number of its guns.

The next great step in memorizing is to pick out the essentials of the subject, arrange them in order, and dwell upon them intently. Think clearly of each essential, one after the other.

Thinking a thing—not allowing the mind to wander to non-essentials—is really memorizing.

Association of ideas is universally recognized as an essential in memory work; indeed, whole systems of memory training have been founded on this principle.

… words—separate comes from separ—and as an automobile driver remembers that two C's and then two H's lead him into Castor Road, Cottman Street, Haynes Street and Henry Street, so important points in your address may be fixed in mind by arbitrary symbols invented by yourself.

The very work of devising the scheme is a memory action.

The psychological process is simple: it is one of noting intently the steps by which a fact, or a truth, or even a word, has come to you. Take advantage of this tendency of the mind to remember by association.

The daily memorizing of a beautiful passage in literature will not only lend strength to the memory, but will store the mind with gems for quotation. But whether by little or much add daily to your memory power by practise.

Memorize out of doors.

The buoyancy of the wood, the shore, or the stormy night on deserted streets may freshen your mind as it does the minds of countless others.

Lastly, cast out fear. Tell yourself that you can and will and do remember. By pure exercise of selfism assert your mastery.

Be obsessed with the fear of forgetting and you cannot remember.

Practise the reverse. Throw aside your manuscript crutches—you may tumble once or twice, but what matters that, for you are going to learn to walk and leap and run.

Lastly, cast out fear. Tell yourself that you can and will and do remember. By pure exercise of selfism assert your mastery. Be obsessed with the fear of forgetting and you cannot remember. Practise the reverse.

Throw aside your manuscript crutches—you may tumble once or twice, but what matters that, for you are going to learn to walk and leap and run.

Now let us try to put into practise the foregoing suggestions. First, reread this chapter, noting the nine ways by which memorizing may be helped.

So clear and exact are nature's laws that we forecast, scores of years in advance, the appearance of a certain comet and foretell to the minute an eclipse of the Sun. And we understand this law of cause and effect in all our material realms.

We do not plant potatoes and expect to pluck hyacinths.

The law is universal: it applies to our mental powers, to morality, to personality, quite as much as to the heavenly bodies and the grain of the fields. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," and nothing else.

Thistle seeds bring forth only the thistle. Contrariwise, it is entirely impossible for continual altruistic, sympathetic, and serviceful thoughts to bring forth a low and vicious character. Either thoughts or feelings precede and determine all our actions.

Actions develop into habits, habits constitute character, and character determines destiny.

Therefore to guard our thoughts and control our feelings is to shape our destinies. The syllogism is complete, and old as it is it is still true.

We are steadily going up toward that which we most wish for, or steadily sinking to the level of our low desires. What we secretly cherish in our hearts is a symbol of what we shall receive.

Our trains of thoughts are hurrying us on to our destiny.

When you see the flag fluttering to the South, you know the wind is coming from the North. When you see the straws and papers being carried to the Northward you realize the wind is blowing out of the South.

Right thinking constantly assumes that the will sits enthroned to execute the dictates of mind, conscience and heart. Never tolerate for an instant the suggestion that your will is not absolutely efficient.

The way to will is to will—and the very first time you are tempted to break a worthy resolution—and you will be, you may be certain of that—make your fight then and there.

You cannot afford to lose that fight. You must win it—don't swerve for an instant, but keep that resolution if it kills you. It will not, but you must fight just as though life depended on the victory;

"I will not be discouraged! I want so badly to know how to speak!" It was warm, human, and from the very heart. And he did keep on trying—and developed into a creditable speaker.

There is no power under the stars that can defeat a man with that attitude.

He who down in the deeps of his heart earnestly longs to get facility in speaking, and is willing to make the sacrifices necessary, will reach his goal. "Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find;

These all realized their strongest desires. The law is universal.

Desire greatly, and you shall achieve; sacrifice much, and you shall obtain.

Stanton Davis Kirkham has beautifully expressed this thought:

The perception of the ludicrous is a pledge of sanity.

And let him be sure to leave other men their turns to speak.

"As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not," said Demosthenes, "so men are proved by their speeches whether they be wise or foolish." Surely the occasional address furnishes a severe test of a speaker's wisdom.

To be trivial on a serious occasion, to be funereal at a banquet, to be long-winded ever—these are the marks of non-sense.

Some imprudent souls seem to select the most friendly of after-dinner occasions for the explosion of a bomb-shell of dispute. Around the dinner table it is the custom of even political enemies to bury their hatchets anywhere rather than in some convenient skull.

To be trivial on a serious occasion, to be funereal at a banquet, to be long-winded ever—these are the marks of non-sense. Some imprudent souls seem to select the most friendly of after-dinner occasions for the explosion of a bomb-shell of dispute.

Around the dinner table it is the custom of even political enemies to bury their hatchets anywhere rather than in some convenient skull.

It is the height of bad taste to raise questions that in hours consecrated to good-will can only irritate.

But do not spin a whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable.

There is no way, short of sheer power of speech, that so surely leads to the heart of an audience as rich, appropriate humor.

The scattered diners in a great banqueting hall, the after-dinner lethargy, the anxiety over approaching last-train time, the over-full list of over-full speakers—all throw out a challenge to the speaker to do his best to win an interested hearing.

In conversation avoid the extremes of forwardness and reserve.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

The father of W.E. Gladstone considered conversation to be both an art and an accomplishment. Around the dinner table in his home some topic of local or national interest, or some debated question, was constantly being discussed.

Men made pilgrimages to Goethe's library and Coleridge's home to be charmed and instructed by their speech, and the culture of many nations was immeasurably influenced by the thoughts that streamed out from those rich well-springs.

Most of the world-moving speeches are made in the course of conversation.

Conferences of diplomats, business-getting arguments, decisions by boards of directors, considerations of corporate policy, all of which influence the political, mercantile and economic maps of the world, are usually the results of careful though informal conversation, and the man whose opinions weigh in such crises …

You must force your mind to persist along the chosen line of conversation and resolutely refuse to be diverted by any subject or happening that may unexpectedly pop up to distract you. To fail here is to lose effectiveness utterly.

Concentration is the keynote of conversational charm and efficiency.

The haphazard habit of expression that uses bird-shot when a bullet is needed insures missing the game, for diplomacy of all sorts rests upon the precise application of precise words, particularly—if one may paraphrase Tallyrand—in those crises when language is no longer used to conceal …

We may frequently gain new light on old subjects by looking at word-derivations.

Conversation signifies in the original a turn-about exchange of ideas, yet most people seem to regard it as a monologue.

Bronson Alcott used to say that many could argue, but few converse. The first thing to remember in conversation, then, is that listening—respectful, sympathetic, alert listening—is not only due to our fellow converser but due to ourselves.

A good conversationalist who monopolizes all the conversation, will be voted a bore because he denies others the enjoyment of self-expression, while a mediocre talker who listens interestedly may be considered a good conversationalist because he permits his companions to please themselves through self-expression.

They are praised who please: they please who listen well.

The first step in remedying habits of confusion in manner, awkward bearing, vagueness in thought, and lack of precision in utterance, is to recognize your faults. If you are serenely unconscious of them, no one—least of all yourself—can help you.

They cannot long be interested in your ills and troubles. George Cohan made himself a millionaire before he was thirty by writing cheerful plays. One of his rules is generally applicable to conversation: "Always leave them laughing when you say good bye."

Dynamite the "I" out of your conversation.

Not one man in nine hundred and seven can talk about himself without being a bore. The man who can perform that feat can achieve marvels without talking about himself, so the eternal "I" is not permissible even in his talk.

"It is not so much the high cost of living as the cost of high living." Such observations as these excite about the same degree of admiration as is drawn out by the appearance of a 1903-model touring car.

If you have nothing fresh or interesting you can always remain silent.

How would you like to read a newspaper that flashed out in bold headlines "Nice Weather We Are Having," or daily gave columns to the same old material you had been reading week after week?

68. Locks and Keys. There is a key for every lock. No difficulty so great, no truth so obscure, no problem so involved, but that there is a key to fit the lock.

The search for the right key, the struggle to adjust it, the vigilance to retain it—these are some of the problems of success.

70. Rooming With a Ghost. Influence of the woman graduate of fifty years before on the college girl who lives in the room once occupied by the distinguished "old grad."

The occasions of war lie upon the surface, and are known and read of all men, while the causes of war are embedded in racial antagonisms, in political and economic controversies. Narrative historians portray the occasions of war; philosophic historians, the secret and hidden causes.

Thus the spark of fire that falls is the occasion of an explosion, but the cause of the havoc is the relation between charcoal, niter and saltpeter.

The occasion of the Civil War was the firing upon Fort Sumter. The cause was the collision between the ideals of the Union presented by Daniel Webster and the secession taught by Calhoun. The occasion of the American Revolution was the Stamp Tax;

Belgium has a standing army of 42,000 men, and Germany, with three reserves, perhaps 7,000,000 or 8,000,000. Without waiting for any assistance, this little Belgium band went up against 2,000,000.

It is as if a honey bee had decided to attack an eagle come to loot its honeycomb.

It is as if an antelope had turned against a lion. Belgium has but 11,000 square miles of land, less than the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Her population is 7,500,000, less than the single State of New York.

And yet, little Belgium has no gold or silver mines, and all the treasures of copper and zinc and lead and anthracite and oil have been denied her.

The gold is in the heart of her people.

No other land holds a race more prudent, industrious and thrifty! It is a land where everybody works.

The Great Belgium Plain in History

But the institutions of Belgium and the industrial prosperity of her people alone are not equal to the explanation of her unique heroism.

Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Cæsar said that Gaul was inhabited by three tribes, the Belgæ, the Aquitani, the Celts, "of whom the Belgæ were the bravest."

Long ago, in his Commentaries, Julius Cæsar said that Gaul was inhabited by three tribes, the Belgæ, the Aquitani, the Celts, "of whom the Belgæ were the bravest."

History will show that Belgians have courage as their native right, for only the brave could have survived.

The southeastern part of Belgium is a series of rock plains, and if these plains have been her good fortune in times of peace, they have furnished the battlefields of Western Europe for two thousand years.

Nobody believes that no difficulties remain. Some of them are obvious. But the common-sense, the mixture of patience and determination that has conquered risks and mischiefs in the past, may be trusted with the future.

Strange and devious are the paths of history.

Broad and shining channels get mysteriously silted up. How many a time what seemed a glorious high road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac.

Strange and devious are the paths of history. Broad and shining channels get mysteriously silted up.

How many a time what seemed a glorious high road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac.

Think of Canning's flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the Spanish republics in South America—that he had called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.

Strange and devious are the paths of history.

Broad and shining channels get mysteriously silted up.

How many a time what seemed a glorious high road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac.

What is progress? It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define.

If you want a platitude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition.

Or shall we say that most definitions hang between platitude and paradox? There are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of religion. There must be about as many of poetry. There can hardly be fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.

… words of the President of Harvard, that those gains, like the prosperous working of your institutions and the principles by which they are sustained, are in essence moral contributions, "being principles of reason, enterprise, courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness, timidity, and distrust."

It is the moral impulses that matter.

Where they are safe, all is safe.

It is the moral impulses that matter.

Where they are safe, all is safe.

When this and the like is said, nobody supposes that the last word has been spoken as to the condition of the people either in America or Europe. Republicanism is not itself a panacea for economic difficulties.

a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best, alike as regard the things of the body and the things of the soul.

Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from us.

We have duties to others and duties to ourselves—and we can shirk neither.

Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power, as a nation has seen during a century and a quarter of its national life, is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that rises to greatness.

Power invariably means both responsibility and danger.

Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee.

If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to work hard they shall know only enjoyment, you are preparing them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves.

Teach boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives spent in avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming difficulties.

Teach them that work, for themselves and also for others, is not curse but a blessing;

… to win triumphs for themselves and their country, not of allowing them the opportunity, and giving them the privilege of making their own place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number of children so limited that they might "taste a few good things!"

The way to give a child a fair chance in life is not to bring it up in luxury, but to see that it has the kind of training that will give it strength of character.

Even apart from the vital question of national life, and regarding only the individual interest of the children themselves, happiness in the true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any given member of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well brought up, …

… infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble.

No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble and labor.

Save in exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life must be paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of work for a worthy end, and ordinarily of work more for others than for one's self.

He has had no organization; only a practical ideal—the reestablishment of equal opportunity. Not his deeds alone, not his immortal words alone, not his personality alone, not his matchless powers alone, but all combined compel national faith and confidence in him.

Every crisis evolves its master.

Time and circumstance have evolved Woodrow Wilson. The North, the South, the East, and the West unite in him.

New Jersey will indorse his nomination by a majority of 100,000 of her liberated citizens.

We are not building for a day, or even a generation, but for all time.

New Jersey believes that there is an omniscience in national instinct. That instinct centers in Woodrow Wilson. He has been in political life less than two years. He has had no organization; only a practical ideal—the reestablishment of equal opportunity.

It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone.

There, by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf.

In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests—vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea.

… South America, and the commissioners of Cuba and Porto Rico, who share with us in this undertaking, we give the hand of fellowship and felicitate with them upon the triumphs of art, science, education and manufacture which the old has bequeathed to the new century.

Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.

They record the world's advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of the people, and quicken human genius. They go into the home. They broaden and brighten the daily life of the people. They open mighty storehouses of information to the student.

… its best, and without vanity or boastfulness, and recognizing the manifold achievements of others it invites the friendly rivalry of all the powers in the peaceful pursuits of trade and commerce, and will cooperate with all in advancing the highest and best interests of humanity.

The wisdom and energy of all the nations are none too great for the world work.

The success of art, science, industry and invention is an international asset and a common glory.

The wisdom and energy of all the nations are none too great for the world work.

The success of art, science, industry and invention is an international asset and a common glory.

After all, how near one to the other is every part of the world. Modern inventions have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and make them better acquainted. Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced.

After all, how near one to the other is every part of the world. Modern inventions have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and make them better acquainted.

Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced.

Swift ships and fast trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade.

now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and seas.

God and man have linked the nations together.

No nation can longer be indifferent to any other.

now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and seas. God and man have linked the nations together.

No nation can longer be indifferent to any other.

And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion is there for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for the settlement …

The excess must be relieved through a foreign outlet, and we should sell everywhere we can and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions, and thereby make a greater demand for home labor.

The period of exclusiveness is past.

The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.

The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.

Commercial wars are unprofitable.

A policy of good will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.

Who can tell the new thoughts that have been awakened, the ambitions fired and the high achievements that will be wrought through this Exposition?

Gentlemen, let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.

We hope that all who are represented here may be moved to higher and nobler efforts for their own and the world's good, and that out of this city may come not only greater commerce and trade for us all, but, more essential than these, …

It was a serious and thoughtful time. The boys of that day felt dimly, but deeply, that days of sharp struggle and high achievement were before them.

They looked at life with the wondering yet resolute eyes of a young esquire in his vigil of arms.

They felt a time was coming when to them should be addressed the stern admonition of the Apostle, "Quit you like men; be strong."

the drilling of a militia company by Ellsworth attracted national attention; the fluttering of the flag in the clear sky drew tears from the eyes of young men.

Patriotism, which had been a rhetorical expression, became a passionate emotion, in which instinct, logic and feeling were fused.

The country was worth saving; it could be saved only by fire; no sacrifice was too great; the young men of the country were ready for the sacrifice; come weal, come woe, they were ready.

Men can be miserable under the best government and they can be happy under the worst government.

Government affects but a part of the life which we live here and does not deal at all with the life beyond, while religion touches the infinite circle of existence as well as the small arc of that circle which we spend on earth.

No greater theme, therefore, can engage our attention.

… must secure the coöperation of a majority before I can put my ideas into practise, but if, in speaking on religion, I can touch one human heart for good, I have not spoken in vain no matter how large the majority may be against me.

Man is a religious being; the heart instinctively seeks for a God.

Whether he worships on the banks of the Ganges, prays with his face upturned to the sun, kneels toward Mecca or, regarding all space as a temple, communes with the Heavenly Father according to the Christian creed, man is essentially devout.

And, fourth, one whose morality rests upon a nice calculation of benefits to be secured spends time figuring that he should spend in action.

Those who keep a book account of their good deeds seldom do enough good to justify keeping books.

A noble life cannot be built upon an arithmetic; it must be rather like the spring that pours forth constantly of that which refreshes and invigorates.

And, fourth, one whose morality rests upon a nice calculation of benefits to be secured spends time figuring that he should spend in action. Those who keep a book account of their good deeds seldom do enough good to justify keeping books.

A noble life cannot be built upon an arithmetic; it must be rather like the spring that pours forth constantly of that which refreshes and invigorates.

Morality is the power of endurance in man; and a religion which teaches personal responsibility to God gives strength to morality. There is a powerful restraining influence in the belief that an all-seeing eye scrutinizes every thought and word and act of the individual.

And our food, must we understand it before we eat it? If we refused to eat anything until we could understand the mystery of its growth, we would die of starvation.

But mystery does not bother us in the dining-room; it is only in the church that it is a stumbling block.

I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty. I took some of the seeds and dried them and weighed them, and found that it would require some five thousand seeds to weigh a pound;

How does it build a watermelon? Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty and say just what He would do or how He would do it.

I cannot explain the watermelon, but I eat it and enjoy it.

The egg is the most universal of foods and its use dates from the beginning, but what is more mysterious than an egg? When an egg is fresh it is an important article of merchandise;

When an egg is fresh it is an important article of merchandise; a hen can destroy its market value in a week's time, but in two weeks more she can bring forth from it what man could not find in it.

We eat eggs, but we cannot explain an egg.

Water has been used from the birth of man;

she sacrifices for them, she surrenders herself to them. Is it because she expects them to pay her back? Fortunate for the parent and fortunate for the child if the latter has an opportunity to repay in part the debt it owes.

But no child can compensate a parent for a parent's care.

In the course of nature the debt is paid, not to the parent, but to the next generation, and the next—each generation suffering, sacrificing for and surrendering itself to the generation that follows. This is the law of our lives.

The seeming paradox: "He that saveth his life shall lose it and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it," has an application wider than that usually given to it; it is an epitome of history.

Those who live only for themselves live little lives, but those who stand ready to give themselves for the advancement of things greater than themselves find a larger life than the one they would have surrendered.

Wendell Phillips gave expression to the same idea when he said, "What imprudent men the benefactors of the race have been. How prudently most men sink into nameless graves, while now and then a few forget themselves into immortality."

Wendell Phillips gave expression to the same idea when he said, "What imprudent men the benefactors of the race have been. How prudently most men sink into nameless graves, while now and then a few forget themselves into immortality."

We win immortality, not by remembering ourselves, but by forgetting ourselves in devotion to things larger than ourselves.

Instead of being an unnatural plan, the plan of salvation is in perfect harmony with human nature as we understand it. Sacrifice is the language of love, and Christ, in suffering for the world, adopted the only means of reaching the heart.

Instead of being an unnatural plan, the plan of salvation is in perfect harmony with human nature as we understand it.

Sacrifice is the language of love, and Christ, in suffering for the world, adopted the only means of reaching the heart.

This can be demonstrated not only by theory but by experience, for the story of His life, His teachings, His sufferings and His death has been translated into every language and everywhere it has touched the heart.

But love is the foundation of Christ's creed. The world had known love before; parents had loved their children, and children their parents; husbands had loved their wives, and wives their husbands; and friend had loved friend; but Jesus gave a new definition of love.

His love was as wide as the sea; its limits were so far-flung that even an enemy could not travel beyond its bounds.

Other teachers sought to regulate the lives of their followers by rule and formula, but Christ's plan was to purify the heart and then to leave love to direct the footsteps.

Our enmities and animosities arise largely from our efforts to get as much as possible out of the world—there will be peace when our endeavor is to put as much as possible into the world.

The human measure of a human life is its income; the divine measure of a life is its outgo, its overflow—its contribution to the welfare of all.

Christ also led the way to peace by giving us a formula for the propagation of truth. Not all of those who have really desired to do good have employed the Christian method—not all Christians even.

The first is the forcible method, and it has been employed most frequently. A man has an idea which he thinks is good; he tells his neighbors about it and they do not like it.

This makes him angry; he thinks it would be so much better for them if they would like it, and, seizing a club, he attempts to make them like it.

But one trouble about this rule is that it works both ways;

In order that there might be no mistake in His plan of propagating the truth, Christ went into detail and laid emphasis upon the value of example—"So live that others seeing your good works may be constrained to glorify your Father which is in Heaven."

There is no human influence so potent for good as that which goes out from an upright life.

A sermon may be answered; the arguments presented in a speech may be disputed, but no one can answer a Christian life—it is the unanswerable argument in favor of our religion.

There is no human influence so potent for good as that which goes out from an upright life.

A sermon may be answered; the arguments presented in a speech may be disputed, but no one can answer a Christian life—it is the unanswerable argument in favor of our religion.

It may be a slow process—this conversion of the world by the silent influence of a noble example—but it is the only sure one, and the doctrine applies to nations as well as to individuals.

and the last lingering rays, more even than the glories of noon, announced how divine was the source from which they proceeded; how incapable to be quenched; how certain to rise on a morning which no night should follow.

Such a character was made to be loved. It was loved.

Those who knew and saw it in its hour of calm—those who could repose on that soft green—loved him. His plain neighbors loved him; and one said, when he was laid in his grave, "How lonesome the world seems!" Educated young men loved him.

The people have work to be done and our party is here to do that work. Abuse will only strengthen it, ridicule only hasten its growth, falsehood only speed its victory. For years this party has been forming.

Parties exist for the people; not the people for parties.

Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work of the parties instead of the parties doing the work of the people—and the politicians own the parties.

Parties exist for the people; not the people for parties. Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work of the parties instead of the parties doing the work of the people—and the politicians own the parties.

The people vote for one party and find their hopes turned to ashes on their lips; and then to punish that party, they vote for the other party.

So it is that partisan victories have come to be merely the people's vengeance; and always the secret powers have played their game.

Neither of the old parties' nominees for President can escape obligation to these old-party bosses or shake their practical hold on many and powerful members of the National Legislature.

Under this boss system, no matter which party wins, the people seldom win; but the bosses almost always win.

And they never work for the people. They do not even work for the party to which they belong. They work only for those anti-public interests whose political employees they are. It is these interests that are the real victors in the end.

American business men should never know an hour of uncertainty, discouragement or fear; American workingmen never a day of low wages, idleness or want.

Hunger should never walk in these thinly peopled gardens of plenty.

And yet in spite of all these favors which providence has showered upon us, the living of the people is the problem of the hour. Hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans find it difficult to get enough to live on.

Heretofore, we have done just the other thing. That is why American business is upset every few years by unnecessary tariff upheavals and is weakened by uncertainty in the periods between.

The greatest need of business is certainty; but the only thing certain about our tariff is uncertainty.

What, then, shall we do to make our tariff changes strengthen business instead of weakening business? Rival protective tariff nations have answered that question. Common sense has answered it.

We progressives mean that America shall answer them. The Progressive party is the helping hand to those whom a vicious industrialism has maimed and crippled.

We are for the conservation of our natural resources; but even more we are for the conservation of human life.

Our forests, water power and minerals are valuable and must be saved from the spoilers; but men, women and children are more valuable and they, too, must be saved from the spoilers.

As wage-earners, they should help to solve the labor problem; as property owners they should help to solve the tax problem; as wives and mothers they should help to solve all the problems that concern the home.

And that means all national problems; for the Nation abides at the fireside.

If it is said that women cannot help defend the Nation in time of war and therefore that they should not help to determine the Nation's destinies in time of peace, the answer is that women suffer and serve in time of conflict as much …

And, so, never doubt that a braver, fairer, cleaner America surely will come; that a better and brighter life for all beneath the flag surely will be achieved. Those who now scoff soon will pray. Those who now doubt soon will believe.

Soon the night will pass; and when, to the Sentinel on the ramparts of Liberty the anxious ask: "Watchman, what of the night?" his answer will be "Lo, the morn appeareth."

Knowing the price we must pay, the sacrifice we must make, the burdens we must carry, the assaults we must endure—knowing full well the cost—yet we enlist, and we enlist for the war.

The "Acres of Diamonds" which I have mentioned through so many years are to be found in Philadelphia, and you are to find them. Many have found them.

And what man has done, man can do.

I could not find anything better to illustrate my thought than a story I have told over and over again, and which is now found in books in nearly every library.

If this internal melted mass burst out and copied very quickly it became granite; that which cooled less quickly became silver; and less quickly, gold; and after gold diamonds were made.

Said the old priest, "A diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight."

This is a scientific truth also. You all know that a diamond is pure carbon, actually deposited sunlight—and he said another thing I would not forget:

And the old priest told Al Hafed that if he had a handful of diamonds he could purchase a whole country, and with a mine of diamonds he could place his children upon thrones through the influence of their great wealth.

Al Hafed heard all about diamonds and how much they were worth, and went to his bed that night a poor man—not that he had lost anything, but poor because he was discontented and discontented because he thought he was poor.

He said: "I want a mine of diamonds!" So he lay awake all night, and early in the morning sought out the priest. Now I know from experience that a priest when awakened early in the morning is cross.

So this farmer in Pennsylvania decided that he would apply for a position with his cousin in Canada. Now, you see, this farmer was not altogether a foolish man. He did not leave his farm until he had something else to do.

Of all the simpletons the stars shine on there is none more foolish than a man who leaves one job before he has obtained another.

And that has especial reference to gentlemen of my profession, and has no reference to a man seeking a divorce. So I say this old farmer did not leave one job until he had obtained another.

What is forty-five dollars a week for a man with a brain like mine! Mother, let's go out to California and stake out gold claims and be immensely rich."

"Now," said his mother, "it is just as well to be happy as it is to be rich."

But as he was the only son he had his way—they always do;

Oh, the poor miserable, contemptible American monkey! He couldn't carry paper and envelopes twenty feet. I suppose he could not get his arms down. I have no pity for such travesties of human nature. If you have no capital, I am glad of it.

You don't need capital; you need common sense, not copper cents.

A.T. Stewart, the great princely merchant of New York, the richest man in America in his time, was a poor boy; he had a dollar and a half and went into the mercantile business.

… made, and sixty-seven out of the remaining hundred made their fortunes in towns of less than six thousand people, and the richest man in the country at that time lived in a town of thirty-five hundred inhabitants, and always lived there and never moved away.

It is not so much where you are as what you are.

But at the same time if the largeness of the city comes into the problem, then remember it is the smaller city that furnishes the great opportunity to make the millions of money.

I care not what your profession or occupation in life may be; I care not whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, a housekeeper, teacher or whatever else, the principle is precisely the same.

We must know what the world needs first and then invest ourselves to supply that need, and success is almost certain.

A.T. Stewart went on until he was worth forty millions. "Well," you will say, "a man can do that in New York, but cannot do it here in Philadelphia."

Let the man who loves his flag and believes in American principles endeavor with all his soul to bring the capitalist and the laboring man together until they stand side by side, and arm in arm, and work for the common good of humanity.

He is an enemy to his country who sets capital against labor or labor against capital.

Suppose I were to go down through this audience and ask you to introduce me to the great inventors who live here in Philadelphia. "The inventors of Philadelphia," you would say, "Why we don't have any in Philadelphia. It is too slow to invent anything."

… it in the wheels in your head nor the wheels in your machine, but first find out what the people need, and then apply yourself to that need, and this leads to invention on the part of the people you would not dream of before.

The great inventors are simply great men; the greater the man the more simple the man; and the more simple a machine, the more valuable it is.

Did you ever know a really great man? His ways are so simple, so common, so plain, that you think any one could do what he is doing. So it is with the great men the world over.

Lee, the President of the University?" He said, "Sir, I am General Lee." Of course, when you meet such a man, so noble a man as that, you will find him a simple, plain man.

Greatness is always just so modest and great inventions are simple.

I asked a class in school once who were the great inventors, and a little girl popped up and said, "Columbus." Well, now, she was not so far wrong.

if you go around this hoe handle, the farther off you go the farther down you go. I can sail around to the East Indies." How plain it all was. How simple the mind—majestic like the simplicity of a mountain in its greatness.

Who are the great inventors? They are ever the simple, plain, everyday people who see the need and set about to supply it.

I was once lecturing in North Carolina, and the cashier of the bank sat directly behind a lady who wore a very large hat. I said to that audience, "Your wealth is too near to you; you are looking right over it."

I said to that audience, "Your wealth is too near to you; you are looking right over it." He whispered to his friend, "Well, then, my wealth is in that hat." A little later, as he wrote me, I said,

"Wherever there is a human need there is a greater fortune than a mine can furnish."

He caught my thought, and he drew up his plan for a better hat pin than was in the hat before him, and the pin is now being manufactured. He was offered fifty-five thousand dollars for his patent.

He is the richest man in the entire New England States, if Mr. Lawson is to be trusted in his statement concerning such things, and yet that man's fortune was made by consulting his own children in his own house.

You don't need to go out of your own house to find out what to invent or what to make.

I always talk too long on this subject.