Live and learn
 |
| Live and learn - A self-help book |
The readers of these pages will soon discover that they are facing a platform or a pulpit, and listening to spoken words. They are printed as they were spoken because any attempt to change them into essays would have altered their essential character. If they have any value, it is because they are the direct communication of a living man to living men and women, of whose presence he is conscious, for whose response he is waiting.
The audiences who have listened to them have included many young men and women, and many also who are no longer young, and I shall be glad if the same thing is true of the readers.
They contain many truths the full value of which I did, not myself ap prehend until the youth was long past, and there may be others whose development has been as tardy as my own. On the whole, I am inclined to hope that, if the book is worth anything, it may be worth nearly as much to parents, and perhaps to teachers, and possibly to preachers, as to the young folks at whom it is chiefly aimed.
This is a book for learners. People who have finished their education will have no use for it. This does not mean that it is exclusively for young people. I know a number of men and women who are more than seventy years old, and who are now more eager to learn than they ever were before in their lives, and I know a good many under seventeen who think that they know it all now, and are nearly incapable of learning anything. Such young people will not read the book, and such old people may find something in it. We begin with learning to think.
Thinking is an art that can be learned by study and practice. It is as truly an art as is bread making or piano playing.
The rudest barbarian has had some training in this art; his thinking powers have been disciplined by use and experience, but the difference between the barbarian and the Harvard professor consists less in the native endowment than in the powers acquired by discipline.
Contents:
i. learning to think I
ii. learning to speak 22
iii. learning to see 42
iv. learning to hear 63
v. learning to give ...... 83
vi. learning to serve 98
vii. learning to win 118
viii. learning to wait 140
the book details :
Download 3.7 MB