Twentieth century musings, being things thought out

Front matter

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Foreword

Mlfc^HERE is just one objection to this book, # C\ and that is the title.

^^^^ Twentieth' Century Musings is hardly appropriate. It should have been ** Twenty- Second/' or *' Twenty-Fifth Century Musings." ^^ The author of this book is ahead of her time. She is an exceptional thinker, and does not represent this century, but all centuries. What this woman knows now, may be known to all, two hundred years from now.

Truth is immortal. It is classic; and the classic is the thing that never grows old.

Here we find portable wisdom, nuggets of fact and sentiment fused.

The proverb, the epigram, the orphic saying, have come down to us from the days of Solomon. Socrates made the world vastly his debtor by such homely commonsense sayings as this : ** Do too much for a boy and he will never do much for himself."

Here is a sentiment that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, with the youth Alcibiades in mind. It is one of the things eternally true that has to be reiterated, restated, emphasized again and again. <L No thinking person can read these Musings without finding his own ideas here reflected. My good friend, M. Clay Burbridge, says the things that we would all say — if we had the mind. When we read them we say, ** Yes, yes ; that is what I always held." And there comes to us the dictum of Ralph Waldo Emerson, " Speak your thoughts today, for tomorrow you shall take them from another at secondhand."

The genius is the individual who catches the electric spark as it flashes through his mind, and transforms it into words.

Man is the instrument of deity. He is a divine transformer. And the great desire of Nature seems to be to evolve an individual who can express her meanings to the many.

This book is a mine of treasures to which literary workers and thinkers will be beholden. Such proverbs as you will find here were never written ofiliand.

Thoughts like these come at unexpected times and places ; and the author is the person who has the skill to seize and fix into simple words these eternal truths which enlarge and benefit and uplift our lives.

—ELBERT HUBBARD