Orison Swett Marden
You will always have to live with yourself, and it is to your best interest to see that you have good company - a clean, pure, straight, honest, upright, generous, magnanimous companion.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Strong
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.'Collection: Done
Opportunities? They are all around us ... There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.Collection: Inspirational
There is genius in persistence. It conquers all opposers. It gives confidence. It annihilates obstacles. Everybody believes in a determined man. People know that when he undertakes a thing, the battle is half won, for his rule is to accomplish whatever he sets out to do.Collection: Confidence
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.Collection: Greatness
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.Collection: Change
Self-Control is the very essence of character. To be able to look a man straight in the eye, calmly and deliberately, without the slightest ruffle of temper under extreme provocation, gives a sense of power which nothing else can give. To feel that you are always, not sometimes, master of yourself, gives a dignity and strength to character, buttresses it, supports it on every side, as nothing else can. This is the culmination of thought mastery.Collection: Eye
Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.Collection: Strength
It is what we do easily and what we like to do that we do well.Collection: Purpose
Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.Collection: Determination
He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't.Collection: Inspirational
No one has a corner on success. It is his who pays the price.Collection: Pay The Price
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Men
We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest.Collection: Order
You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.Collection: Failure
To think you can creates the force that can.Collection: Thinking
The world makes way for the man with an idea.Collection: Men
Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young. A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everybody around us.Collection: Friendship
There is no failure for the man who realizes his power, who never knows when he is beaten; there is no failure for the determined endeavor, the conquerable will. There is no failure for the man who gets up every time he falls, who rebounds like a rubber ball, who persists when everyone else gives up, who pushes on when everyone else turns back.Collection: Inspirational
Make it a life-rule to give your best to whatever passes through your hands. Stamp it with your manhood. Let superiority be your trademark.Collection: Hands
Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe.Collection: Happiness
The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.Collection: Book
Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.Collection: Children
The quality of your work, in the long run, is the deciding factor on how much your services are valued by the world.Collection: Success
The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. 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 the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.Collection: Wisdom
We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere - your ideal of what you long to attain - the ideal of health, efficiency, success.Collection: Inspirational
How true it is that, if we are cheerful and contented, all nature smiles, the air seems more balmy, the sky clearer, the earth has a brighter green... the flowers are more fragrant... and the sun, moon, and stars all appear more beautiful, and seem to rejoice with us.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Hands
Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts. What he at first chooses, at last compels.Collection: Inspirational
There is no stimulus like that which comes from the consciousness of knowing that others believe in us.Collection: Motivational
What are stumbling blocks and defeat to the weak and vacillating are but stepping stones to victory to the determined soul.Collection: Block
What we sincerely believe regarding ourselves is true for us.Collection: Believe
Power gravitates to the man who knows how.Collection: Power
The trouble with us is that we expect too much from the great happenings, the unusual things, and we overlook the common flowers on the path of life, from which we might abstract sweets, comforts, delights.Collection: Sweet
To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success.Collection: Success
One penny may seem to you a very insignificant thing, but it is the small seed from which fortunes spring.Collection: Money
Put yourself in your customer's place.Collection: Motivational Business
Society is to the individual what the sun and showers are to the seed. It develops him, expands him, unfolds him, calls him out of himself. Other men are his opportunity. Each one is a match which ignites some new tinder in him unignitible by any previous match. Without these the sparks of individuality would sleep in him forever.Collection: Sleep
Something greater than wealth, grander even than fame — that manhood, character, stand for success, and that nothing else really does.Collection: Success
Paradise is here or nowhere: you must take your joy with you or you will never find it.Collection: Inspirational
Every one who has labored honestly in the past has aided to place knowledge and comfort within the reach of a constantly increasing number.Collection: Work
The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, their character-building power.Collection: Book
Make every occasion a great occasion, for you can never tell who may be taking your measure for a higher place.Collection: May
Dreams that are realized become an inspiration for new endeavor. It is in the power to make the dream good that we find the hope of this world.Collection: Dream
Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize her.Collection: Opportunity
Analyzing what you haven't got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.Collection: Motivational