Quotes from Orison Swett Marden

No one is mocked with the yearning for that which they have no ability to attain.

he wins the prize who pays the price.

I am success. Though hungry, cold, ill-clad, I wander for a while, and I smile and say: 'It is but for a time. I shall be glad tomorrow, for good fortune comes my way. God is my Father. He has wealth untold; His wealth is mine, health, happiness and gold.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, says Mary Wortley Montagu; nor any pleasure so lasting. Good books elevate the character, purify the taste, take the attractiveness out of low pleasures, and lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living. It is not easy to be mean directly after reading a noble and inspiring book. The conversation of a man who reads for improvement or pleasure will be flavored by his reading; but it will not be about his reading.

We have acquired the habit of not being equal to ourselves.

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.

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.

The world is a looking-glass which flings back to us the reflection of ourselves. If we laugh it laughs back at us. If we shed tears, it reflects a sorrowful face.

The bird does not have an instinct to fly South in winter without a real South to match it; nor has the Creator given to us these heart yearnings, soul longings for a larger, completer life, for an opportunity for a full expression of our possibilities, nor the longing for immortality, without a reality to match them.

whether it is an engine or a human brain,—exercise or deteriorate is the law of life.

Fear and doubt, discouragement and worry are always found together. They belong to the same family, and work for the same end — to rob people of energy and ambition, and to keep them from doing what they were made to do. They have ever been the great retarders of human progress, the great killers of ability, the blighters of happiness, the stranglers of aspirations, the murderers of success.

Phillips Brooks used to say that after a man has once discovered that he has been living but a half-life the other half will haunt him until he releases it, and he never again will be content to live a half-life.

Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible.

The man who can smile when everything seems to go against him shows that he is made of winning material, for no ordinary man can do this. Carlyle says that some people are rich in the power to be miserable. Such people seem to have a genius for radiating mental poison. They project their gloom into your mind in spite of your efforts to protect yourself. They insist that they were born so, that they cannot help having the "blues" and being despondent.

Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.

You have no more right to go about among your fellows with a vinegary expression on your face, radiating mental poison, spreading the germs of doubt, fear, discouragement, and despondency upon them, than you have to inflict bodily injuries. You have no more right to poison other people's happiness than their bodies.

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

books. They are friends to the lonely, companions to the deserted, joy to the joyless, hope to the hopeless, good cheer to the disheartened, a helper to the helpless. They bring light into darkness, and sunshine into shadow.

There is somebody not far from you at this moment, my doubting, discouraged friend, who could step into your place and command victory with the resources which you think so inadequate for the work you have to do. There is somebody who has no more ability than you have who could see an unusual opportunity in the situation which you find so hopeless, so discouraging.

There is something inside of a man which protests against doing that which tends to injure another, that which does not square with his God nature, with the best thing in him; that which is not working in response to his highest aspiration.

Tis easy enough to be pleasant when life flows on like a song, But the man worthwhile is the man with a smile when everything goes dead wrong.

Robust health and optimism produce happiness. The power of a sunny soul to transform the most trying situations in life is beyond all power to compute. The world loves the sunny soul, the man who carries his holidays in his eye and his sunshine with him. The determination to be kind and helpful to every one, to be cheerful, no matter what comes to us, is a great happiness producer. When a man does not find repose in himself it is vain for him to seek it elsewhere.

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

I could read and walk four miles an hour.