Quotes from Orison Swett Marden

Form the habit early in life of leaving your business at the store or wherever you may be employed. Never carry it home to mar the peace of your family; if you do, you will soon drive out the sunshine.

If you would attract good fortune, you must get rid of doubt. As long as that stands between you and your ambition, it will be a bar that will cut you off. You must have faith. No man can make a fortune while he is convinced that he can't.

Unless generosity of spirit prevails among men, there can never be upon earth an ideal life.

We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest.

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

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.

The waste of life occasioned by trying to do too many things at once is appalling.

The man who would forge to the front in this competitive age must be a man of prompt and determined decision.

When the mind has once formed the habit of holding cheerful, happy, prosperous pictures, it will not be easy to form the opposite habit.

The most fascinating person is always the one of the most winning manners; not the one of greatest physical beauty.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.

Whoever uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.

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 with whom you come in contact every day.

Strength of will is the test of a young man's possibilities. Can he will strong enough and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip?

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

Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.

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

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

The quality of your work, in the long run, is the deciding factor on how much your services are valued by the world.

No one has a corner on success. It is his who pays the price.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.

The man who has not learned the secret of taking the drudgery out of his task by flinging his whole soul into it, has not learned the first principles of success or happiness.

The hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where others see shadows and storm.