Orison Swett Marden Quotes

116 Sourced 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 desire.

Orison Swett Marden
Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young. A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everybody around us.

Orison Swett Marden
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. Such a man makes every acre of land in his community worth more, and makes richer every man who lives near him.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
You will never succeed while smarting under the drudgery of your occupation, if you are constantly haunted with the idea that you could succeed better in something else.

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

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
Poverty often hides her charms under an ugly mask; yet thousands have been forced into greatness by their very struggle to keep the wolf from the door.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

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

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

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
Mirth is God's medicine; everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety-all the rust of life- ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth.

Orison Swett Marden
Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you are now wasting, dreaming of some far off success may be crowded with grand possibilities.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
Let us open up our natures, throw wide the doors of our hearts and let in the sunshine of good will and kindness.

Orison Swett Marden
No man can hope to accomplish anything great in this world until he throws his whole soul, flings the force of his whole life, into it. It is not enough simply to have a general desire to accomplish something. There is but one way to do that; and that is, to try to be somebody with all the concentrated energy we can muster.

Orison Swett Marden
Real happiness is so simple that most people do not recognize it. They think it comes from doing something on a big scale, from a big fortune, or from some great achievement, when, in fact, it is derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things in the world.

Orison Swett Marden
Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize her.

Orison Swett Marden
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.

Orison Swett Marden
Most men fail, not through lack of education, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

Orison Swett Marden
When you finish a thing you ought to be able to say to yourself: 'There, I am willing to stand for that piece of work. It is not pretty well done; it is done as well as I can do it; done to a complete finish. I will stand for that. I am willing to be judged by it.'

Orison Swett Marden
Whatever comes to us in life we create first in our mentality. As the building is a reality in all its details in the architects mind before a stone or brick is laid, so we create mentally everything which later becomes a reality in our achievement.

Orison Swett Marden
Good cheer is a great lubricant; it oils all of life's machinery.

Orison Swett Marden
The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.

Orison Swett Marden
No one should voluntarily remain in an environment which prevents his development.

Orison Swett Marden