Personality

no better than the rest of mankind, and why should I fear to make him mad? Let him get mad if he wants to. It is his privilege, but I am a free agent in consciousness, and the divine thinker of my own thoughts, and he had better look out that he does not make me mad." No one had ever dared to "make him mad," yet the fact remained that he was "mad" all the time and a confirmed grouch. The dear ones in the home, who love us, may protect us in our destructive states of consciousness, and we make them the victims of our moods and tenses; but there will come a time and place when the world will teach us that if we sulk or act spitefully we will do it alone. The whole world of successful business waits for the big, genial, loving person, who will be a mascot for it; but it has no place for the crabbed, uncontrolled, moody, sulking individual, who thinks the whole world was made to serve and adjust to him. We have no more right to pour our discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us, and rob them of their sunshine and brightness, than we have the right to enter their houses and steal the silverware. Unhappy black moods, discouragement, hasty temper, sulks and grouches are mental habits, and they have no more right to be allowed to persist than any other indelicate, uncultivated habit. It is just as uncouth and ungentlemanly, to wear a sulk as it is to wear a soiled collar. Neither will be tolerated where the standards are true and high. Gentleness, patience, consideration for others, self-forgetfulness and true selfness, are all the trophies of well-directed thought culture. They build up a personality that has one hundred percent of attracting force. We can be small, mean, narrow, bigoted and fault-finding, with our hand against every man, and his hand against us, but as the years go on, we lose our value in every respect; our room is preferred to our company. People will tolerate us, but they will not desire us, and after a while the whole world will pass us by, leaving us to eat out our hearts with the bitterness of spirit which our own discordant thinking has engendered within us. We can set ourselves to clean up these endless little weaknesses of disposition, and put in their place, through persistent self-culture, the states of mind and heart which bring us forth as a personality valuable in every walk of life. We can be "big," true and kind, patient, forbearing, full of wisdom and understanding, and the world will come and gathe