The Might of Little Things : Part 1

Architects of Fate: Steps to Success and Power
by Orison Swett Marden

(Page 15 of 21)

Little strokes fell great oaks. - Franklin.

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles, life. Young.

"Scorn not the slightest word or deed,
Nor deem it void of power;
There's fruit in each wind-wafted seed,
That waits its natal hour."

It is but the littleness of man that saw no greatness in trifles. - Wendell Phillips.

He that despised small things should fall by little and little. - Ecclesiasticus.

Often from our weakness our strongest principles of conduct are born; and from the acorn, which a breeze has wafted, springs the oak which defies the storm. - Bulwer.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. - Emerson.

Men are led by trifles. - Napoleon I.

"A pebble on the streamlet scant
Has turned the course of many a river;
A dewdrop on the baby plant
Has warped the giant oak forever."

The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing. - Scotch Proverb.

"A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,
And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;
A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,
And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way."

"Arletta's pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of William the Conqueror," says Palgrave's "History of Normandy and England." "Had she no. Therefore fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire."

Small things become great when a great soul sees them. Trifles light as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize the world.

We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved forever. We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man never saw, walked to the river's edge to find their food.

The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.

It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless mental growth. A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress of the human race more than ten centuries.

Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.

The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an educated man to shame. Returning home, an Indian discovered that his venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen. After careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods. Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old, white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog. The man told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the Indian had not even seen the one he described. He asked the Indian how he could give such a minute description of the man whom he had never seen. "I knew the thief was a little man," said the Indian, "because he rolled up a stone to stand on in order to reach the venison; I knew he was an old man by his short steps; I knew he was a white man by his turning out his toes in walking, which an Indian never does; I knew he had a short gun by the mark it left on the tree where he had stood it up; I knew the dog was small by his tracks and short steps, and that he had a bob-tail by the mark it left in the dust where he sat."

Two drops of rain, falling side by side, were separated a few inches by a gentle breeze. Striking on opposite sides of the roof of a court-house in Wisconsin, one rolled southward through the Rock River and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico; while the other entered successively the Fox River, Green Bay, Lake Michigan, the Straits of Mackinaw, Lake Huron, St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, Detroit River, Lake Erie, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and finally reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence. How slight the influence of the breeze, yet such was the formation of the continent that a trifling cause was multiplied almost beyond the power of figures to express its momentous effect upon the destinies of these companion raindrops. Who can calculate the future of the smallest trifle when a mud crack swells to an Amazon, and the stealing of a penny may end on the scaffold? Who does not know that the act of a moment may cause a life's regret? A trigger may be pulled in an instant, but the soul returns never.

A spark falling upon some combustibles led to the invention of gunpowder. Irritable tempers have marred the reputation of many a great man, as in the case of Edmund Burke and of Thomas Carlyle. A few bits of seaweed and driftwood, floating on the waves, enabled Columbus to stay a mutiny of his sailors which threatened to prevent the discovery of a new world. There are moments in history which balance years of ordinary life. Dana could interest a class for hours on a grain of sand; and from a single bone, such as no one had ever seen before, Agassiz could deduce the entire structure and habits of an animal so accurately that subsequent discoveries of complete skeletons have not changed one of his conclusions.

A cricket once saved a military expedition from destruction. The commanding officer and hundreds of his men were going to South America on a great ship, and, through the carelessness of the watch, they would have been dashed upon a ledge of rock had it not been for a cricket which a soldier had brought on board. When the little insect scented the land, it broke its long silence by a shrill note, and this warned them of their danger.

Copyright, 1895 by Orison Swett Marden.
All Rights Reserved.