Author:

Orison Swett Marden

Publisher:

Thomas Y. Crowell & Company

Year Published:

1900

Number of Pages:

64

Number of Chapters:

Seven

Sub-Title:

A Passport To Success

How can one hope to attain a high degree of advancement in life, in character-building, or in all-round success, without complete control of personal habits both physical and mental?

The truly successful man has all his faculties under control. He has a strong grip on himself, and holds to his task of self-government under good fortune and bad, through prosperity and adversity. The strong man is he who never allows the lower elements of his nature to usurp the place of the higher; who makes servants of his passions, and governs them with reference to his physical and mental welfare. The bearing of this on good manners is obvious. One who has not himself in his own power is not unlikely to commit some serious breach of decorum at a critical time. No gentleman will lose his temper.

It is related of an Oxford student that he became angry in a debate while at table, and threw a glass of wine into the face of his opponent; but John Henderson, who was arguing upon the other side, calmly wiped his face, and said; “This, Sir is a digression; now for the argument.” Of the two, John Henderson was the nobleman, although it so happened that his coarse and hot-tempered adversary bore the title. A manly power of indignation is needful, but is not he who can be provoked and yet restrain himself the stronger man?

Mr. Christman of the Bank of England, attributed the secret of his self-control under very trying circumstances to a rule which he learned from William Pitt – never to lose his temper during banking hours.

“The most important attribute of man as a moral being,” says Herbert Spencer, “is the faculty of self-control. In the supremacy of self-control consists one of the perfections of the ideal man. Not to be impulsive, not to be spurred hither and thither by each desire that in turn comes uppermost, but to be self-contained, self-balanced, governed by the joint decision of the feelings in council assembled, before which every action shall have been fully debated and calmly determined, - that it is which education, moral education, at least, strives to produce."

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