Orison Swett Marden Life Quotations

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.

Regard every suggestion that your life may be a failure, that you are not made like those who succeed, and that success is not for you, as a traitor, and expel it from your mind as you would a thief from your house.

One of the secrets of a successful life is to be able to hold all of our energies upon one point, to focus all of the scattered rays of the mind upon one place or thing.

Do not waste time dreaming of great faraway opportunities; do the best you can where you are. Open your petals of power and beauty and fling out the fragrance of your life in the place that has been assigned to you.

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.

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson.

One can make no better investment than the cultivation of a taste for the beautiful, for it will bring rainbow hues and enduring joys to the whole life. It will not only greatly increase one's capacity for happiness, but also one's efficiency.

Do not give up your dream because it is apparently not being realized, because you cannot see it coming true. Cling to your vision with all the tenacity you can muster. Keep it bright; do not let the bread-and-butter side of life cloud your ideal or dim it.

Just try the effect of putting beauty into your life, a little every day. You will find it magical. It will broaden and light up your outlook upon the world as the acquisition of money or fame never can.

The great thing in life is efficiency. If you amount to anything in the world, your time is valuable, your energy precious. They are your success capital, and you cannot afford to heedlessly throw them away or trifle with them.

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 great aim of your life should be to keep your powers up to the highest possible standard, to so conserve your energies, guard your health, that you can make every occasion a great occasion.

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

You are never to allow a shadow of doubt to enter your mind that the Creator intended you to win in life's battle.

Circumstances have rarely favored great men. A lowly beginning is no bar to a great career. The boy who works his way through college may have a hard time of it, but he will learn how to work his way in life, and will usually take higher rank in school and in after life than his classmate who is the son of a millionaire.

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.

It is just as important to set apart time for the development of our aesthetic faculties as for cultivating the money-getting instinct. A man cannot live by bread alone. His higher life demands an impalpable food.

Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.

No one can make the most of himself until he looks upon his life as a magnificent possibility, the materials for a great masterpiece, to mar or spoil which would be a great tragedy.

Our visions are the plans of the possible life structure, but they will end in plans if we do not follow them up with a vigorous effort to make them real, just as the architect's plans will end in his drawings if they are not followed up and made real by the builder.

There is not a single indication in man's wonderful mechanism that he was created for a life of poverty. There is something larger and grander for him in the divine plan than perpetual slavery to the bread-winning problem.

When the sacredness of one's word is matched in the attributes of his character throughout, all that constitutes a man, then we find that there is something in a man's life greater than his occupation or his achievements; grander than acquisition or wealth; higher than genius; more enduring than fame.

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.

Who can estimate the real wealth that inheres in a fine character. . . . How base and mean money and huge estates look in comparison. All other things fade before it. Its touch is like magic to win friendship, influence, power. Can you afford to chill, to discourage, to crush out of your life this sweet, sensitive plant, which would flower in your nature and give added glory to your life, for the sake of a few dollars, a little questionable fame?

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.

Life is not mean, it is grand; if it is mean to any, he or she makes it so. God made it glorious. It is paved with diamonds; its banks he fringed with flowers. He overarched it with stars. Around it He spread the glory of the physical universe-suns, moon, worlds, constellations, systems-all that is magnificent in motion, sublime in magnitude, and grand in order and obedience. God would not have attended life with this broad march of grandeur if it did not mean something.

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.