related to you.

Out of every thousand books published, perhaps nine hundred of them do
not sell enough to pay the cost of printing them. As you study the
books that do live, you note that they are the books that have been
lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them
and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse.
They come out of the author's head. The books that live must come out
of his heart. They are his own life. They come surging and pulsating
from the book of his experience.

The best part of our schooling comes not from the books, but from the
men behind the books.

We study agriculture from books. That does not make us an
agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go out and agricult. That is the
knowing in the doing.

You Must Live Your Song

"There was never a picture painted,
There was never a poem sung,
But the soul of the artist fainted,
And the poet's heart was wrung."

So many young people think because they have a good voice and they have
cultivated it, they are singers. All this cultivation and irritation
and irrigation and gargling of the throat are merely symptoms of a
singer--merely neckties. Singers look better with neckties.

They think the song comes from the diaphragm. But it comes from the
heart, chaperoned by the diaphragm. You cannot sing a song you have not
lived.

Jessie was singing the other day at a chautauqua. She has a beautiful
voice, and she has been away to "Ber-leen" to have it attended to. She
sang that afternoon in the tent, "The Last Rose of Summer." She sang it
with every note so well placed, with the sweetest little trills and
tendrils, with the smile exactly like her teacher had taught her.
Jessie exhibited all the machinery and trimmings for the song, but she
had no steam, no song. She sang the notes. She might as well have sung,
"Pop, Goes the Weasel."

The audience politely endured Jessie. That night a woman sang in the
same tent "The Last Rose of Summer." She had never been to Berlin, but
she had lived that song. She didn't dress the notes half so beautifully
as Jessie did, but she sang it with the tremendous feeling it demands.
The audience went wild. It was a case of Gussie and Bill Whackem.

All this was gall and wormwood to Jessie. "Child," I said to her, "this
is the best singing lesson you have ever had. Your study is all right
and you have a better voice than that woman, but you cannot sing "