Warren Hilton

“ Health is a boon. It is not the greatest boon. Health is not life. Health is but a means to life. Life is service. Life is achievement. Health is of value in so far as it contributes to achievement.
Our study of the relation between mind and body at this time has had a deeper, broader and more vital purpose. It is the foundation stone of an educational structure in which we shall show you how the mind may be brought by scientific measures to a certainty and effectiveness of operation far greater than is now common or ordinarily thought possible. ”

“ So long as you are in doubt and perplexity conflicting ideas and impulses balance each other. You are not then a man of action; you are a wavering coward. You are afflicted with paralysis of will and mental stagnation.
Decide the matter—that is to say, let one mental picture assume a greater vividness than the other until it possesses your soul—and forthwith the banked fires of your mental energy will burst into flame. ”

“ History is full of the acts of men who discovered somewhat of their own capacity; but history has yet to record the man who fully discovered all that he might have been."
You who are a bit vain of your visits to other lands, your wide reading, your experience of men and things; you who secretly lament that so little of what you have seen and read remains with you, behold, your "acres of diamonds" are within you, needing but the mystic formula that shall reveal the treasure! ”

“ Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Emotion, earnestness, fire, enthusiasm—these [Pg 42] are the very life of effort. They are steam to the engine; they are what the lighted fuse is to the charge of dynamite. They are the elements that give flash to the eye, spring to the step, resoluteness to the languid and certainty to effort. ”

“ The vast majority of sense-impressions awaken no reaction. They are registered in the mind, but they are not perceived. We are not conscious of them. They form a part, not of consciousness, but of subconsciousness. They are messages that reach the mind but are laid aside like unopened mail because they possess no present interest.
Wherever and however you may be placed, you are always and everywhere immersed in a flood of etheric vibrations. Light, sound and tactual vibrations press upon you from every side. At a busy corner of a city street these vibrations rise to a tumultuous fortissimo ”

“ You will often hear some "live-wire" business man spoken of as a "human dynamo." He has the faculty of turning out a stupendous amount of work in a comparatively short time. How he can carry in his mind the details of so many large projects, how he can accomplish so much in actual, tangible results in many directions, how he can pull the strings of so many enterprises without getting lost in the maze of detail, is the marvel of his associates. ”

“ Do not understand us as saying that imagination, as the term is popularly used, is all you need. There must be also action, incessant, persistent. But creative imagination, in a psychological and scientific sense, begets action. Every thought carries with it the impellent energy to effect its realization. Use your imagination in your business and the action will take care of itself. Given imagination and action, and you are sure to win. ”

“ Ideas are the keys which open the storehouses of possibility. Ideas are the passports to the realms of great achievement. Ideas are the touch-buttons which connect the currents of energy with the wheels of history. ”

“ This other thing, this physical table, whatever it is, can never be directly known, if indeed it has any existence, a fact that many distinguished philosophers have had the courage to deny.
Imagine, then, for a moment that everything except mind should suddenly cease to exist, but that your sense-perceptions—that [Pg 52] is to say, your perception of sensory impressions—were to continue to follow one another as before. Would not the physical world be for you just exactly what it is today, and would you not have the same reasons for believing in its existence that you now have? ”

“ It is well enough to preach that the secret of achievement is to be found in "courage-faith" and "courage-confidence," and that the way to acquire these qualities is to assume that you have them. There is no denying the undoubted fact that men and women have been rescued from the deepest mire of poverty and despair and lifted to planes of happy abundance by what is known as "faith." ”

“ The Subconscious Storehouse And of the complexes of subconsciousness, some are far more readily recalled than others. Some are forever popping into one's thoughts, while others can be brought to the light of consciousness only by some unusual and deep-probing stimulus. And the human mind is a vast storehouse of complexes, far the greater part buried in subconsciousness, yet somehow, like impressions on the wax cylinder of a phonograph, preserved with life-like truth and clearness.
Turn back for a moment to our definition of memory. You will observe that its second essential element is Recall. ”

“ For the supply of mental energy is as inexhaustible as the reservoir of all past experience, while the supply of physical energy involved in brain and nerve activity is, like the immortal liver of Prometheus, renewed as fast as depleted. ”

“ Every concrete thing in the world is the product of a thinking consciousness. The richly tinted canvas is the physical expression of the artist’s dream. The great factory, with its whirling mechanisms and glowing furnaces, is the material manifestation of the promoter’s financial imagination. ”

“ Philosophers have been wrangling for some thousands of years as to whether we have any real and absolute knowledge, as to whether matter actually does or does not exist, as to the reliability or unreliability of the impressions we receive through the senses. But there is one thing that all scientific men are agreed upon, and that is that such knowledge as we do possess comes to us by way of perception through the organs of sense. ”

“ All life, whether it be the life of a single cell or of an unorganized group of cells or of a republic of cells, has as its basis the life of the cell.
For all the animate world, two great principles stand established. First, that every living organism, plant or animal, big or little, develops from a cell, and is itself a composite of cells, and that the cell is the unit of all life. Secondly, that the big and complex organisms have through long ages developed out of simpler forms, the organic life of today being the result of an age-long process of evolution. ”

“ Attention is the artisan that, bit by bit, and with lightning quickness, constructs the mosaic of consciousness.
Having the whole vast store of all present and past experiences to draw upon, he selects only those groups and [Pg 50] How the Attention Works those isolated instances that are related to our general interests and aims. He disregards others.
The attention operates in a manner complementary to the general Laws of Recall. It is an active principle not of association, but of dissociation. ”

“ It is this emotional energy that makes business passion, that makes men love their business, that brings their hearts into harmony with their undertakings, and that gives them splendid visions of commercial greatness. ”

“ If you insist that the table exists outside of your mind, you must admit that your knowledge of it is not direct, immediate and intuitive, but indirect [Pg 50] and representative, because of intervening physical agencies, and that the only thing directly known is the mental impression of the table. On the other hand, if you insist that your knowledge of the table is direct, immediate and intuitive you must admit that the table is only a mental image, a mental reality, if it is any sort of reality at all, and that it has no existence outside of the mind. ”

“ So now, as a business man, unless you have learned the secret of self-mastery, you are unable to concentrate your efforts, your attention is easily distracted, you exhaust yourself in displays of passion, you are forever doing things during business hours that have no relation to your business, you are forever doing things in connection with your business that do not contribute to its progress, you expend just as much energy as the accomplished executive or the successful "hustler," but you fritter it away in unprofitable activities. ”

“ You may be one of those who believe that the mind is nothing more nor less than brain activity. You may believe that the body is all there is to man and that mind-action is merely one of its functions.
If so, we want you nevertheless to realize that, while as a matter of philosophic speculation you retain these opinions, you may at the same time for practical purposes regard the mind as an independent causal agency and believe that it can and does control and determine and cause any and every kind of bodily activity. ”

“ Our explanation of hay fever a moment ago illustrates our meaning. Get the principle clearly in your mind, and see how many instances of its operation you can yourself supply from your own daily experience.
So far as the mere linking together of groups of ideas is concerned, this classifying quality is developed in some persons to a greater degree than in others. It finds its extreme exemplar in the type of man who can never relate an incident without reciting all the prolix and minute details and at the same time wandering far from the original subject in pursuit of every suggested idea. ”