Orison Swett Marden Quotes

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do.

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.

Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.

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.

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

Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.

When we are sure that we are on the right road there is no need to plan our journey too far ahead. No need to burden ourselves with doubts and fears as to the obstacles that may bar our progress. We cannot take more than one step at a time.

There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.

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.

What keeps so many people back is simply unwillingness to pay the price, to make the exertion, the effort to sacrifice their ease and comfort.

Most obstacles melt away when we make up our minds to walk boldly through them.

Learn From Yesterday, Live for Today, hope for tomorrow.

If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place.

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.

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

Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No," though all the world say "Yes.

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.

You will find the whole world will change to you when you change your attitude toward it.

A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everyone around us.

Money, influence, and position are nothing compared with brains, principles, energy and perseverances.

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.

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

Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them...they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.

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

Believe with all of your heart that you will do what you were made to do.

Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.” —ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Your outlook upon life, your estimate of yourself, your estimate of your value are largely colored by your environment. Your whole career will be modified, shaped, molded by your surroundings, by the character of the people whom you come in contact everyday.

Every discovery in science and art, is due to the trained power of seeing things ... Keep your eyes open, your ears open ... Trace difficulties.

The tonic of success is a marvelous producer as well as stimulant. By the law of mental magnetism one success attracts another, and after we begin to win it is comparatively easy to keep on winning.

No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive, he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else.

Love, like the sun, never sees the dark side of anything.

The greatest thing a man can possibly 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. It is not a question of what someone else can do or become which every youth should ask himself, but what can I do? How can I develop myself into the grandest possible manhood?

Never allow yourself to dwell on your weaknesses, your failures, your unhappy condition. Hold firmly the ideal of your efficiency, your competency, your divinity, the conviction that you were made for health, success, and happiness, and struggle vigorously to attain that which will help you to realize this condition.

Tidak mungkin bagi kita untuk sengaja menyakiti orang lain tanpa menyakiti diri kita sendiri juga.

Wisdom will not open her doors to those who are not willing to pay the price in self-sacrifice, in hard work. Her jewels are too precious to scatter before the idle, the ambitionless.

The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably, thought and act.” —ORISON SWETT MARDEN

Personal nobility is greater than any calling, or any reward that it can bring.

Nothing is more foolish, nothing more wicked than to drag the skeletons of the past, the hideous images, the foolish deeds, the unfortunate experiences of yesterday into today's work to mar and spoil it. There are plenty of people who have been failures up to the present moment who could do wonders in the future if they only could forget the past, if they only had the ability to cut it off, to close the door on it forever and start anew.

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.

Just because you are struggling on a farm or in a factory, doing something against which your whole nature rebels, because there is no one to help you support your aged parents or an invalid brother or sister, do not conclude that your vision must perish. Keep pushing on as best you can, and affirming your divine power to attain your desire. Hundreds and thousands of poor boys and girls with poorer opportunities than yours have done immortal deeds because they had faith in their ideal and in their power to attain it.

The highest happiness is the feeling of wellbeing which comes to one who is actively employed in doing what he was made to do; carrying out the great life-purpose patterned in his individual bent.

To have done no man a wrong… to walk and live, unseduced, within arm’s length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude—this is to be a man

Saturate yourself with the ideals, with the convictions which you long to come true. Keep your mind filled with them and they must by the very law of attraction force out their opposites, for like attracts like. If you hold the love thought in your mind the hate thought must go. Love and hate can not live together. Light and darkness can not live together.

The most of us make our backs ache carrying useless, foolish burdens. We carry luggage and rubbish that are of no earthly use, but which sap our strength and keep us jaded and tired to no purpose. If we could only learn to hold on to the things worthwhile, and drop the rubbish, — let go the useless, the foolish, the silly, the hamperers, the things that hinder, — we should not only make progress but we should keep happy and harmonious.

The first part of success is "Get-to-it-iveness"; the second part of success is "Stick-to-it-iveness".

The educated man ought to be able to do something better, something higher than merely to put money in his purse. Money-making can not compare with man-making.

Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.

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

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

Dispense with the doctor by being temperate; the lawyer by keeping out of debt; the demagogue, by voting for honest men; and poverty, by being industrious.

Don't think you have no chance in life because you have no capital to begin with. Most of the rich men of to-day began poor. The chances are you would be ruined if you had capital.

A great many young men try to justify themselves and check inward protests by the perpetual self-suggestion that it is better to keep on, for the present, in questionable occupations, because the great financial reward will put them in position to do better later. This is a sort of sedative to the conscience to keep it quiet until they can afford to listen to it.

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)

WHATEVER THE SOUL IS TAUGHT to expect, that it will build. Our heart longings, our soul aspirations, are something more than mere vaporings of the imagination or idle dreams. They are prophecies, predictions, couriers, forerunners of things which can become realities. They are indicators of our possibilities. They measure the height of our aim, the range of our efficiency.

Always carry yourself as though you were marching to victory, make this impression upon everyone who sees you. Let victory stand out of your very face, let it speak out of your eyes with such determination, with such vigorous resolution that people will know that there is no such thing as keeping you down, no such thing as discouraging you, because you are victory-organized, because you are in the habit of winning. Give people the suggestion of invincibility. This will be worth more to you than a large amount of money capital without it, or with an appearance of cowardice or defeat in your face, a suggestion of weakness or doubt, fear as to the outcome of your career.

The habit of learning to appreciate to the utmost every situation in life adds wonderfully to the sum total of one's happiness. But many people are incapable of real happiness because they never learn to appreciate anything except that which appeals to their own comfort, pleasure, or appetite.

The power of material things, to bestow happiness, to bring joy into the life is tremendously exaggerated. The right mental attitude, the trained mind, will bring to us the best there is in the universe.

Where did the idea come from that we should take life so seriously, anyway? Why should a man be such a slave to his breadwinning? We ought to be able to get a good living, even to make fortunes, and yet have a good time every day of our lives. This idea of being a slave most of the time, and of only occasionally enjoying a holiday, is all wrong.

The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably, thought and act.’’ –Orison Swett Marden

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education,” it was said by Professor Huxley, “is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson which ought to be learned, and, however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson which he learns thoroughly.” Doing

There are marvelous utilities, infinite good and unspeakable beauties in the great cosmic intelligence, the unseen world, ready for our use and enjoyment. If we only had sufficient faith to believe they were there we could draw them to ourselves.

You must have birds in your heart, Madam, before you can find them in the bushes," said John Burroughs, the great naturalist, to a woman who complained that no birds ever came to her orchard, while he counted a score or more there, even while she uttered her plaint.

Your suspicion attracts suspicion. Jealousy brings more jealousy, hate more hate, just as love brings love to meet it, as friendliness brings more friendliness, as sympathy and good will toward all draw the same to you from others and increase your popularity and magnetic power.

The world takes us at our own valuation. It believes in the man who believes in himself, but it has little use for the timid man, the one who is never certain of himself; who cannot rely on his own judgment, who craves advice from others, and is afraid to go ahead on his own account.

FEARS AND doubts repel prosperity. Abundance cannot get to a person who holds such a mental attitude. Things that are unlike in the mental realm repel one another. Trying to become prosperous while always talking poverty, thinking poverty, dreading it, predicting that you will always be poor, is like trying to cure disease by always thinking about it, picturing it, visualizing it, believing that you are always going to be sick, that you never can be cured. Nothing can attract prosperity but that which has an affinity for it, the prosperous thought, the prosperous conviction, the prosperity faith, the prosperity ambition.

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.

True prosperity is the inward consciousness of spiritual opulence, wholeness, completeness; the consciousness of oneness with the very Source of abundance, Infinite Supply; the consciousness of possessing an abundance of all that is good for us, a wealth of personality of character that no disaster on land or sea could destroy.

The college diploma has no more power to hold the knowledge you have gained in college than a piece of tissue paper over a gas jet can hold the gas in the pipe.

It is not so much a question of how far you have traveled as which way you face. It is facing life the right way, with .the right spirit, that will push you forward.

Worry clogs the brain and paralyzes the thought. A troubled brain can not think clearly, vigorously, locally.

One of the worst doctrines ever set afloat is that real happiness is in material things instead of in a condition of mind.

churches have unconsciously encouraged the development of fear by using it as a weapon to whip people into church attendance, the performance of church duties, etc.!

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.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; morals grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Resolve that you will be the master and not the slave of circumstances.

Real happiness cannot be bribed by anything sordid or low.

Better a cheap coffin and a plain funeral after a useful, unselfish life, than a grand mausoleum after a loveless, selfish life.

Nature hates all botched and half-finished work, and will pronounce her curse upon it.

Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of the storm wind is to the eagle,—a force against him that lifts him higher.

Specialize or fail

You must have birds in your heart, Madam, before you can find them in the bushes,

No man ever climbed to success on another's back.

One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits and profitably employed would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science. One hour a day would in ten years make an ignorant man a well-informed man…In an hour a day, a boy or girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully—over seven thousand pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year. An hour a day might make all the difference between bare existence and useful, happy living. An hour a day might make—nay, has made—an unknown man a famous one, a useless man a benefactor to his race.

One of the strangest things in life is the false ideas everywhere prevalent regarding the nature of happiness. The general belief seems to be that it is founded on things that can be bought with money. The more money the more things, and the more things the more enjoyment, the greater the degree of happiness. But money has never yet been known to buy happiness. No one has ever yet found happiness by chasing it over the earth. It is not in our food, it is not in our drink, it is not in our clothes or material possessions; it is not in excitement or a constant round of pleasure. Happiness is born of right living. It is the child of right thinking, and right acting, of helpful service. A selfish life never knows real happiness. Greed and envy never touch it.

SAVE. If you want to test a young man and ascertain whether nature made him for a king or a subject, give him a thousand dollars and see what he will do with it. If he is born to conquer and command, he will put it quietly away till he is ready to use it as opportunity offers. If he is born to serve, he will immediately begin to spend it in gratifying his ruling propensity. —Parton.

Before water generates steam, it must register two hundred and twelve degrees of heat. Two hundred degrees will not do it; two hundred and ten will not do it. The water must boil before it will generate enough steam to move an engine, to run a train. Lukewarm water will not run anything. A great many people are trying to move their life trains with lukewarm water—or water that is almost boiling—and they are wondering why they are stalled, why they cannot get ahead. They are trying to run a boiler with two hundred or two hundred and ten degrees of heat, and they cannot understand why they do not get anywhere.” Lukewarmness in his work stands in the same relation to man’s achievement as lukewarm water does to the locomotive boiler. No man can hope to accomplish anything great in this world until he throws his whole soul, flings his force to his whole life, into it.

A fatal penalty awaits those who always look on the dark side of everything, who are always predicting evil and failure, who see only the seamy, disagreeable side of life. They draw upon themselves what they see, what they look for.

The human machine is the only medium by which the soul and the mind connect with the material world, and this marvelous mechanism, this temple Beautiful, should be kept in the superbest condition, for whatever mars it mars the soul's expression. M In our present system of education we are taught nearly everything except the very thing that we ought to know most about—the art of living. The schools and colleges teach scores of things that we never use directly in practical life,

Fun is the cheapest and best medicine in the world for your children as well as for yourself. Give it to them in good large doses. It will not only save you doctors' bills, but it will also help to make your children happier, and will improve their chances in life.

Some people get along beautifully, for half a lifetime, perhaps, while everything goes smoothly. While they are accumulating property and gaining friends and reputation, their characters seem to be strong and well-balanced; but the moment there is friction anywhere,—the moment trouble comes, a failure in business, a panic, or a great crisis in which they lose their all,—they are overwhelmed. They despair, lose heart, courage, faith, hope, and power to try again,—everything. Their very manhood or womanhood is swallowed up by a mere material loss.

It is," says Professor Mathews, "only by continued, strenuous efforts, repeated again and again, day after day, week after week, and month after month, that the ability can be acquired to fasten the mind to one subject, however abstract or knotty, to the exclusion of everything else.

Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility ... Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation because there was money in it.

Remember that there is something else in the world even more important than making money. Your health, your family, your friendships should mean a thousand times more to you than dollarchasing. Life was given us for enjoyment, not for one long, strenuous, straining struggle in the dreary drudgery of scraping dollars together.

Orison Swett Marden, who wrote Character: The Grandest Thing in the World in 1899, produced another popular title in 1921. It was called Masterful Personality. Many of these guides were written for businessmen, but women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called “fascination.” Coming of age in the 1920s was such a competitive business compared to what their grandmothers had experienced, warned one beauty guide, that they had to be visibly charismatic: “People who pass us on the street can’t know that we’re clever and charming unless we look it.” Such advice—ostensibly meant to improve people’s lives—must have made even reasonably confident people uneasy. Susman counted the words that appeared most frequently in the personality-driven advice manuals of the early twentieth century and compared them to the character guides of the nineteenth century. The earlier guides emphasized attributes that anyone could work on improving, described by words like Citizenship Duty Work Golden deeds Honor Reputation Morals Manners Integrity But the new guides celebrated qualities that were—no matter how easy Dale Carnegie made it sound—trickier to acquire. Either you embodied these qualities or you didn’t: Magnetic Fascinating Stunning Attractive Glowing Dominant Forceful Energetic It was no coincidence that in the 1920s and the 1930s, Americans became obsessed with movie stars. Who better than a matinee idol to model personal magnetism?

The habit of thinking of ourselves as sublime, or having a lofty conception of our possibilities, of imagining ourselves as being commanded by the Almighty to do a great work on this earth, of thinking of ourselves as not only human but divine, gods in the making, because we are a product of Divinity, will help us wonderfully to grasp the higher meaning of life and do the thing worth while.

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.

If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future.

The great trouble with all of us who are struggling with unhappy or unfortunate conditions is that we have separated ourselves in some way from the great magnetic center of creation. We are not thinking right, and so we are not attracting the right things. “Think the things you want.” The profoundest philosophy is locked up in these few words. Think of them clearly, persistently, concentrating upon them with all the force and might of your mind, and struggle toward them with all your energy. This is the way to make yourself a magnet for the things you want. But the moment you begin to doubt, to worry, to fear, you demagnetize yourself, and the things you desire flee from you. You drive them away by your mental attitude. They cannot come near you while you are deliberately separating yourself from them. You are going in one direction, and the things you want are going in the opposite direction.

Don't wait for a higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill it as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow-workmen. Study your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not in simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a larger salary.