This boy, who, because he loved art and music, was thought good for nothing, made Prussia one of the greatest nations of Europe.
How stupid and clumsy is the blinking eagle at perch, but how keen his glance, how steady and true his curves, when turning his powerful wing against the clear blue sky! Ignorant parents compelled the boy Arkwright to become a barber's apprentice, but Nature had locked up in his brain a cunning device destined to bless humanity and to do the drudgery of millions of England's poor; so he must needs say "hands off" even to his parents, as Christ said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business ?" Galileo was set apart for a physician, but when compelled to study anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes and stealthily work out the abstruse problems.

He was only eighteen when he discovered the principle of the pendulum in a lamp left swinging in the cathedral at Pisa.

He invented both the microscope and telescope, enlarging knowledge of the vast and minute alike.
The parents of Michael Angelo had declared that no son of theirs should ever follow the discreditable profession of an artist, and even punished him for covering the walls and furniture with sketches; but the fire burning in his breast was kindled by the Divine Artist, and would not let him rest until he had immortalized himself in the architecture of St.Peter's, in the marble of his Moses, and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call, haunting the boy until he laid aside his grammar for Euclid.
The father of Joshua Reynolds rebuked his son for drawing pictures, and wrote on one: "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Yet this "idle boy" became one of the founders of the Royal Academy.
Turner was intended for a barber in Maiden Lane, but became the greatest landscape-painter of modern times.
Claude Lorraine, the painter, was apprenticed to a pastry-cook; Moliere, the author, to an upholsterer; and Guido, the famous painter of Aurora, was sent to a music school.
Schiller was sent to study surgery in the military school at Stuttgart, but in secret he produced his first play, "The Robbers," the first performance of which he had to witness in disguise.

The irksomeness of his prison-like school so galled him, and his longing for authorship so allured him, that he ventured, penniless, into the inhospitable world of letters.

A kind lady aided him, and soon he produced the two splendid dramas which made him immortal.
The physician Handel wished his son to become a lawyer, and so tried to discourage his fondness for music.