Orison Swett Marden

“ I have inherited the wealth of the universe. The earth and the stars and the sun are mine. I will quit this everlasting self-depreciation, this self-effacement, this cringing habit of forever appearing to apologize for being alive. It is a crime against my Maker and myself. Henceforth I shall carry myself like a prince. I will act like one, and will walk the earth as a conqueror. I will let no opportunity pass to-day for assuming any responsibility which will enlarge me, for expressing my opinion, for asserting myself whenever and wherever necessary. ”

“ It always pains me to hear a youth who ought to be full of hope and high promise express a doubt as to his future career. To hear him talk about his possible failure sounds like treason to his Creator. Why, youth itself is victory. Youth is a great prophecy, the forerunner of a superb fulfillment. A young man or a young woman talking about failure is like beauty talking about ugliness; like superb health dwelling upon weakness and disease; like perfection dwelling upon imperfection. Youth means victory, because everything in the life of the healthy boy or girl is looking upward. ”

“ The man who goes to an employer in a discouraged attitude and begs for work on the ground that he needs it very much; who whines and complains how hard it is for any one who shows the signs of age to get a job, is not going to get one.
If you are in the clutches of a poverty so dire that it robs you even of the desire to get away from it, you are cursed with self-thought poisoning. This is what mars and embitters so many lives, drives away happiness, health and prosperity. ”

“ What mothers endure for many years for their children would kill them or drive them to an insane asylum in half the time but for love. This is the healing balm that cures all hurts, lightens all burdens, that takes the drudgery out of service. It is love alone that enables the poor mother to risk her life for her child, to go through terrible experiences in her struggles with poverty and sickness to rear her children. A burden half as great which had no love in it would crush the life out of her. But love lightens the load, takes the sting out of poverty, the pain out of sacrifice. ”

“ If you want a better position, more salary, money to pay off debts, or to get what you need, whatever it may be, cling with all the power of your mind to the thing you are trying to get, and never for a moment doubt you will get it. You do not inherit poverty, squalor. Lack and want have nothing whatever to do with God's children. Your inheritance is divine, grand, sublime. Poverty is a mental disease, and you carry the antidote to its poison in your mind. You owe it to the One who has given you life, health, who has given you brains to make something of yourself, to improve your situation. ”

“ Your doubt of your success is probably your biggest handicap. But it would be a thousand times better to make mistakes by forging ahead too rapidly, by undertaking more than we can carry out, than to be forever hovering upon the edge of doubt, delaying, postponing, waiting for certainty, until we become slaves of a habit which we cannot break. And remember that the habit of putting off, of waiting to see how things are going to turn out, to see if something more certain, something with less of risk, will not turn up, is fatal to initiative, fatal to leadership, fatal to efficiency. ”

“ There is something inside of me which insists that I was planned for victory, not for defeat, for happiness, not for misery, for peace of mind, not for a life of worry, anxiety, and fear. I do not believe that I was placed here to be a mere puppet of circumstances. Faith, hope and confidence are my helpers. Doubt is a child of fear, and fear has the great majority of human beings hypnotized, so that they do not dare to forge ahead, do not dare to undertake the things they are perfectly capable of accomplishing. ”

“ We are just beginning to see that faith is as much a real force as is electricity. It is faith that removes mountains—mountains of difficulty, of opposition, of doubt, of distrust. [Pg 38] It clears the track of all obstructions. It makes stepping stones of stumbling blocks. Faith is the most powerful, the most sublime of human attributes. Without it the bottom would drop out of civilization. It is the fundamental principle of life. Faith is the basis of health, of success, of happiness, of love itself. It believes in, hopes, trusts, clings to the loved one in spite of all faults and sins. ”

“ We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are. God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in his life, each feels a trembling, fearful longing to do some great good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in its hidden impulse to do one's best."
Every one who substitutes the finer for the cheaper goal, each one who to-day and every day holds to his high ideal despite the stress and turmoil of modern daily living, in such measure hastens the day when such an ideal will be the inspiration of the masses and the power that moves the world. ”

“ The very struggle to get up through the soil has strengthened its fiber and fitted it to cope with the elements above, with the storms it must meet.
Just like this tender plant, you may be hemmed in by seemingly insurmountable obstacles; you may not see a ray of light through the sod of hard, forbidding circumstances, but hold your vision and keep pushing. In your struggle you will develop strength, you will find sunshine and air, growth and life. You may be shut in by an uncongenial occupation and tempted to lose heart and give up your dreams because you can see no way to better yourself. ”

“ If we were only to prepare the mind for sleep with the same intelligence and care that we prepare the body; if we were to give it a cleansing mental bath, wiping from memory's slate all black, discordant pictures, all the worries and fears which vexed and perplexed us during the day instead of having the nightmare panorama passing and repassing before us during the night, robbing us of needed rest and neutralizing our upbuilding, recuperative forces, what a difference it would make in our achievement, in our lives! ”

“ Instead of thus intensifying them, say to yourself, "The Power that created, and that sustains me every instant of my life, repairs, renews, restores, cures me. I am health, I am vigor, I am power, I am that which I think I am." Refuse to see or to hold for an instant an imperfect, discordant sin or disease-marred image of yourself. Do not harbor a suggestion of your inferiority, physically or mentally. Always picture yourself as a great, strong, splendid man or woman, clean, true, beautiful—a sublime specimen of humanity. ”

“ There is nothing outside of vice which will deform the character so quickly as living in an atmosphere of perpetual hatred, jealousy, envy and revenge. The wear and tear of their vicious vibrations is ever getting in its deadly work.
Love is the great disciplinarian, the supreme harmonizer, the true peacemaker. It is the great balm for all that blights happiness or breeds discontent, a sovereign panacea for malice, revenge, and all brutish passions and propensities. As cruelty melts before kindness, so the evil passions find their antidote in sweet charity and loving sympathy. ”

“ Those boys are all clean-minded, open, frank and chivalrous, and I could not help thinking that a great deal of it was due to the sister's influence.
"To love, and to be loved," said Sydney Smith, "is the greatest happiness of existence." Every one, rich and poor, high and low, is reaching out for love. What will not a man do to win the love of one who embodies his ideal of womanhood; one in whom he sees all the beautiful qualities that he himself lacks! This love is really a divine hunger, the longing for possession of what would make him a whole man instead of the half one he feels he is. ”

“ If they once got a glimpse of their divinity, once saw themselves in the sublime robes of their power, they never again would be satisfied with the rags of their poverty.
But instead of trying to improve their condition, to get away from their failure, poverty-stricken atmosphere, they cling the more closely to it and sink deeper and deeper in the quagmire of their own making. Everywhere we find whining, miserable people grumbling at everything, complaining that "life is not worth living," that "the game is not worth the candle," that "life is a cheat, a losing game." ”

“ We cannot hold the love thought without feeling the uplift, the glow, the divine energy which it sends through the whole system. Nor, on the other hand, can we hold the hate thought, the revenge, the jealous, the envious, or any other mean, selfish thought, without a feeling of depression, a feeling of smallness, of contemptibleness, which robs us of self-respect and of power.
When you denounce and condemn others, when you nurse bitterness and ill will in your heart, you start boomerang vibrations which impair your cell life and seriously mar your happiness and efficiency. ”

“ Such a pathetic, such a tragic ending is not for those who love and are loved, because they keep their hearts open to the joys and sorrows of life; who maintain a sympathetic interest in their fellow-beings and in the progress and uplift of the world; who keep their faculties sharpened by use, and whose minds are constantly reaching out, broadening and growing, in the love and service of humanity. A dismal, useless old age is only for those who have not learned how to live. ”

“ I wish I could burn it into the consciousness of every person who wants to make a success of life that he cannot do so while he associates himself with inferiority and harbors a low estimate of himself. Get away from both. Have nothing to do with them. If you are a victim of the inferiority suggestion, deny the suggestion, drive it from your mind as the greatest enemy of your welfare.
You can only do what you think you can. If you hold in mind a cheap, discreditable picture of yourself; if you doubt your efficiency you are shackled, you are not free to express yourself. ”

“ The divine self-confidence of youth, the unshaken faith that believes all things possible, often makes cynics and world-weary people smile. Yet it is the grandest, most helpful attribute of man, the finest gift of the Creator to the race. If we could retain through life the faith of ambitious, self-confident, untried youth, its unquestioning belief in its ability to carve out its ideal in the actual, what wonders we should all accomplish! ”

“ To attain perfect health we must hold the image of physical perfection, we must constantly keep in mind this ideal state. We must build ourselves thought pictures of a superb body in all its strength and wholeness; we must relentlessly strangle every image of weakness or disease, every sick suggestion that would blur the picture of perfect wholeness and harmony into which we wish to grow.
What a revolution we would make in our lives if we could only learn to live this health ideal instead of its opposite, the disease ideal! ”

“ I can at least show gratitude for health, for the privilege of living in God's pure air and sunlight by holding up my head and walking erectly, joyously, as His child should. I am really insulting the Creator, to whom I pray, by reflecting such despair and degrading poverty in my mental attitude, thus erasing the divine image from my face. No matter how little I have, I can at least appear respectable. I can show that I respect myself by doing away as far as possible with the depressing appearance and influence of poverty. ”

“ Men who leave their mark on the world are men of iron resolution, of grim determination. If youth were only taught at home and in school the power of an inflexible resolve, an inexorable affirmation of the thing they are determined to accomplish; if they were only taught the invincibleness of an unshakable will, of the positive victorious mental attitude, of a resolve which knows no defeat, life would not be half so hard. ”

“ This specter, this shadow of self-depreciation which has held me back so long, which has darkened my path in life must go, for I shall walk henceforth with my face toward the sun so that the shadows of life will fall behind me, and not across my path as before. I am going to face life with a self-respecting, victorious attitude, with a hopeful outlook, for I know that I am victory organized. ”

“ Many a man has been kept from performing a disgraceful, a criminal act by the thought that somebody loved him, believed in him, trusted him.
"Though thy sins be as scarlet they shall be made whiter than snow." Love purifies, lifts up, regenerates. We are all familiar with its wonderful transforming power; how it erases the scars of sin, smooths out the wrinkles which vice has left in the face, softens the hard features and puts its own divine stamp there. ”

“ With abundant crops, with a lowering death rate and increasing longevity of our people, with constantly growing educational facilities, America ought to register every day of every year a high water point of prosperity. But when a large portion of the people lack faith in the future, when, from time to time, uncertainty is in the air, when everybody is doubting and fearing, waiting to see what is coming next, of course business will stagnate. It will follow the prevailing mental attitude, hesitate, waver, doubt, stand still like the idle freight cars. ”

“ A great artist was one day found by a friend in tears in his studio. When asked the cause of his distress, he replied, "I have produced a work with which I am satisfied, and I shall never produce another." It is said he never did. The inspiration that had urged him on was his ideal. That kept him always striving to improve on what he had previously done. Without it there was nothing to strive for.
Without an ideal there is no growth; and where there is no growth there is retrogression. Without a vision the people perish. Nothing in the universe is static. None of us stands still. ”

“ Persist in holding the thought of yourself as you long to be, the ideal which your Creator saw ahead of you when he fashioned you. Cling to your vision of health without taint, weakness or defect.
Have you a hair-trigger temper, and do you fly all to pieces over the least provocation, starting raging fires in your brain that are as destructive to your mental and physical forces as are the great forest fires to the vast tracts of territory over which they sweep? If you have you are minimizing all your powers and seriously endangering your success, your happiness, your life itself. ”

“ He never made any one to be a failure. You are perverting the great object of your existence by giving way to discouragement, going about among your fellows with a long, sad, dejected face, as though you were a misfit, as though there were no place for you in this great glad world of abundance. You were made to express gladness, to go through life with a victorious attitude, like a conqueror. ”