Orison Swett Marden Quotes

Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our desires

The hand cannot reach higher than does the heart.

Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has been the mother of all great inventions.

Every one who has labored honestly in the past has aided to place knowledge and comfort within the reach of a constantly increasing number.

Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.

Laughter brightens the eye, increases the perspiration, expands the chest, forces the poisoned air from the least-used cells, and tends to restore that exquisite poise or balance which we call health.

The golden rule for every business man is this: 'Put yourself in your customer's place.'

We are all the products of our own thoughts. Whatever we concentrate upon, that we are.

Genius, that power which dazzles mortal eyes, is but perseverance in disguise.

We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it including the thorns.

There is inestimable blessing in a cheerful spirit. When the soul throws its windows wide open, letting in the sunshine, and presenting to all who see it the evidence of its gladness, it is not only happy, but it has an unspeakable power of doing good.

Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They have made the giants of our race by giving Titanic muscles, brawny sinews, and far-reaching intellects.

You will always have to live with yourself, and it is to your best interest to see that you have good company - a clean, pure, straight, honest, upright, generous, magnanimous companion.

You must bring every particle of your energy, unanswerable resolution, your best efforts, your persistent industry to your task or the best will not come out of you. You must back up your ambition by your whole nature, by unbounded enthusiasm and a determination to win which knows no failure.

No matter how many obstacles may block your path, or how dark the way, if you look up, think up, and struggle up, you can't help succeeding. Whatever you do for a living, whatever fortune or misfortune, hold the victorious attitude and push ahead.

A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.

Every man ultimately falls into the company with which he affiliates. And he is the strongest who draws men to himself, who creates the company; and this is through having a positive quality - courage and physical prowess.

We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.

We do not know what we can bear until we are put to the test. Many a delicate mother, who thought that she could not survive the death of her children, has lived to bury her husband and the last one of a large family, and in addition to all this has seen her home and last dollar swept away; yet she has had the courage to bear it all and to go on as before. When the need comes, there is a power deep within us that answers the call.

The man who would forge to the front in this competitive age must be a man of prompt and determined decision.

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.

Opportunities? They are all around us ... There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.

How true it is that, if we are cheerful and contented, all nature smiles, the air seems more balmy, the sky clearer, the earth has a brighter green ... the flowers are more fragrant ... and the sun, moon, and stars all appear more beautiful, and seem to rejoice with us.

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

The size of your accomplishments, the quality of your achievement, will depend very largely on how big a man you see in yourself, what sort of image you get of your possible self, yourself at your best.

We cannot separate our lives from time. Why is it that we are so extravagant, so thoughtless, in our waste of time, especially in youth, when we cling so tenaciously to life? You cannot separate a wasted hour from the same duration of your life. If you waste your time, you must waste your life. If you improve your time, you cannot help improving your life.

Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.

The hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where others see shadows and storm.

Opportunity is latent in the very foundation of human society. Opportunity is everywhere about us. But the preparation to seize upon the opportunity, and to make the most of it, is to be made by every one for himself ... he will be self-made or never made.

It is like the seed put in the soil - the more one sows, the greater the harvest.

When you take God into partnership, when you are conscious that you are doing His work, you have a feeling of peace and security. You walk as one who sees a great light because you feel that you have a great Partner, One with whom you cannot lose your way. You do not fear failure because you know that your divine Partner is the very Source of all supply, and you feel safe, reassured. You know that nothing can prevent your success as long as you and your Partner are in harmony.

If our dreams are sincere desires to achieve, not mere pipe-dreams, there is something deep within ourselves which comes out to meet them and helps to make them realities.

Regard every suggestion that your life may be a failure, that you are not made like those who succeed, and that success is not for you, as a traitor, and expel it from your mind as you would a thief from your house.

That disables a lot of people from achieving goals, it is simply, a lack of willingness to pay for these goals, a lack of willingness to make great effort, a lack of willingness to sacrifice their comfort for those goals.

Without this tremendous passion for power, influence, and advantage which money gives, how could nature develop the highest type of man? Without this infinite longing, whence would come the discipline which industry, perseverance, tact, sagacity, and frugality give?

Strength of will is the test of a young man's possibilities. Can he will strong enough and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?

You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.

There is a legend that when God was equipping man for his long life journey of exploration, the attendant good angel was about to add the gift of contentment and complete satisfaction. The Creator stayed his hand and said, 'No, if you bestow that upon him you will rob him forever of all joy of self-discovery.'

What a great discrepancy there is between people and the results they achieve! It is due to the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability, and concentrating them upon one point.

It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind.

If a thing seems to you worth working for at all, if it appears to you of moment enough to challenge any effort, then put into what you do all the enthusiasm of which you are capable, regardless of criticism.

Agassiz would not lecture at five hundred dollars a night, because he had no time to make money.

By constant contemplation of excellence, we clear our selfhood of all dross and impurities.

There is no suffering, except remorse, so fatal as that which comes from the consciousness of strangled ambition, blasted hope, stifled aspiration. To be conscious that we possess decided ability for some particular calling, and to be compelled by circumstances, year after year, to be chained to drudgery which the heart loathes, requires supreme courage.

Who would back you in a race While defeat is in your face?

A woman who is self-reliant, positive, optimistic, and undertakes her work with the assurance of success magnetizes her condition. She draws to herself the creative powers of the universe.

We lift ourselves by our own thought; we climb upon our vision of ourselves.

Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions.

If someone offered to purchase a large percentage of your life power you would not think of selling it, even for a fabulous sum.

The sort of man you will make of yourself, how you will be regarded by the world, whether people will admire and respect or despise you, whether you win the approval or the condemnation of your Maker - all this is in your own hands.

Just make up your mind at the very outset that your work is going to stand for quality ... that you are going to stamp a superior quality upon everything that goes out of your hands, that whatever you do shall bear the hallmark of excellence.

There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.

If you would attract good fortune, you must get rid of doubt. As long as that stands between you and your ambition, it will be a bar that will cut you off. You must have faith. No man can make a fortune while he is convinced that he can't.

One can make no better investment than the cultivation of a taste for the beautiful, for it will bring rainbow hues and enduring joys to the whole life. It will not only greatly increase one's capacity for happiness, but also one's efficiency.

The divine injunction to be perfect, even as He is perfect, was not given man to mock him. The possibility of our waking in His likeness is literally true.

When the mind has once formed the habit of holding cheerful, happy, prosperous pictures, it will not be easy to form the opposite habit.

The time will come when human drones will be ostracized from society as nobodies, as thieves of honest men's efforts, thieves of the results of honest men's labor. The coming civilization will not tolerate these thieves of society, these lazy vagabonds who do nothing but steal the products of their labor and demoralize society by their vicious example.

Many a man owes his advancement very largely to his ability to converse well. The ability to interest people in your conversation, to hold them, is a great power.

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.

There are powers inside of you which, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment, it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.

Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished.

We lend power to the things we fear!

Time is money. We should not be stingy or mean with it, but we should not throw away an hour any more than we would throw away a dollar-bill. Waste of time means waste of energy, waste of vitality, waste of character in dissipation. It means the waste of opportunities which will never come back. Beware how you kill time, for all your future lives in it.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead - no defile that has no outlet - it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty.

There is something greater than wealth, grander even than fame - manhood, character, stand for success ... nothing else really does.

The universe is one great kindergarten. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon our soul.

History furnishes thousands of examples of men who have seized occasions to accomplish results deemed impossible by those less resolute. Prompt decision and whole-souled action sweep the world before them.

Many mothers make the mistake of forever looking for the bad in the child, trying to ... uproot and drive it out. This is like trying to eject the darkness from a room without opening the shutters and letting in the light. As John Newton said, 'I cannot sweep the darkness out, but I can shine it out.'

No matter where your lot may be cast, no power on earth can keep you from making a man of yourself, a superb character, a masterpiece.

If we get the good that belongs to us here and now, we must extract the sweetness of each passing minute while it is ours. That is the real art of living in the today.

Our trials, our sorrows, and our grieves develop us.

Unless generosity of spirit prevails among men, there can never be upon earth an ideal life.

Do not give up your dream because it is apparently not being realized, because you cannot see it coming true. Cling to your vision with all the tenacity you can muster. Keep it bright; do not let the bread-and-butter side of life cloud your ideal or dim it.

What we do for a living does not matter so much as how we do it. It is the spirit in which we do our work that counts, and that counts through all eternity.

I wish I could fill every young man who reads these pages with an utter dread and horror of poverty. I wish I could make you so feel its shame, its constraint, its bitterness that you would make vows against it.

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, and more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is, until you have wasted years precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star.

What we do when defeat stares us in the face is the real touchstone of character. But the very fact that success has time and again proved the means of awakening people to the knowledge of greater ability than they ever before dreamed they possessed, ought to hearten and encourage us to keep on no matter how often we fail. If we brace ourselves and continue to push forward we will ultimately win out. (From Everybody ahead, or getting the most out of life)

He has missed the finest lesson of culture and experience who has not learned how to enjoy without owning.

There is genius in persistence. It conquers all opposers. It gives confidence. It annihilates obstacles. Everybody believes in a determined man. People know that when he undertakes a thing, the battle is half won, for his rule is to accomplish whatever he sets out to do.

There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.

The greatest thing a man can do in this world, is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.

The human mind is happiest when it is most active in performing the functions which it was intended to perform. One of man's greatest passions is that of achievement, the passion for doing things, the ambition to accomplish. This is one of the greatest satisfactions of life, and satisfaction is the chief ingredient in happiness.

One of the best strengtheners of character and developers of stamina ... is to assume the part you wish to play; to assert stoutly the possession of whatever you lack.

We lift ourselves by our thought.

People who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They have not been content with mediocrity. They have not confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others so them, but always a little better. They always pushed things that came to their hands a little higher up, this little farther on, that counts in the quality of life's work. It is constant effort to be first-class in everything one attempts that conquers the heights of excellence.

Find your purpose and fling your life out to it. Find a way or make one. Try with all your might. Self-made or never made.

The world makes way for the man with an idea.

No one is mocked with the yearning for that which he has no ability to attain. If he holds the right mental attitude and struggles earnestly, honestly toward his goal, he will reach it, or at least approximate to it.

When God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, he also calls him to be intelligent and skillful, and strong and brave.

Anybody can work when everything goes smoothly, when there is nothing to trouble him; but a man must be made of the right kind of stuff who can rise above the things which harass and handicap the weak, and do his work in spite of them. Indeed, this is the test of greatness.

The trouble with us is that we try to find happiness where it does not exist, in transient, impermanent things; we try to find it in the gratification of desire; we seek it in animal pleasure. Happiness lives in giving, in doing, not in getting, in grasping.

He is the richest man who enriches his country most; in whom the people feel richest and proudest; who gives himself with his money; who opens the doors of opportunity widest to those about him; who is ears to the deaf, eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame.

A man will remain a rag-picker as long as he has only the vision of a rag-picker.

And above all, study, study, study ! All the genius in the world will not help you along with any art unless you become a hard student. It

Like the sun, love radiates and warms into life all that it touches.

She alone is the happy woman who has learned to extract happiness, not from ideal conditions, but from the actual ones about her. The woman who has mastered the secret will not wait for ideal surroundings; she will not wait until next year, next decade, until she gets rich, until she can travel abroad ... but she will make the most out of life today, where she is. Paradise is here or nowhere. You must take your joy with you or you will never find it.

It is certain that the greatest poets, orators, statesmen, and historians, men of the most brilliant and imposing talents, have labored as hard, if not harder, than day laborers; and that the most obvious reason why they have been superior to other men is that they have taken more pains than other men.