Top 200 Orison Swett Marden Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Quotes About Strength, Strong Quotes, Action Quotes, Opportunity Quotes, Empowerment Quotes

2. “Learn From Yesterday, Live for Today, hope for tomorrow.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Uplifting Quotes

3. “A good system shortens the road to the goal.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Goal Setting Quotes

4. “Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Quotes About Strength, Strong Quotes, Common Sense Quotes, Mental Strength Quotes, Carpe Diem Quotes

5. “Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Obstacles Quotes, Stay Strong Quotes, Grit Quotes

6. “A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Obstacles Quotes, Grit Quotes, Struggle Quotes, Achievement Quotes

7. “The golden rule for every business man is this: ‘Put yourself in your customer’s place.’”

— Orison Swett Marden

8. “There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Human Nature Quotes, Encouraging Quotes for Students, Optimism Quotes, Expectations Quotes, Quotes About Hope

9. “Be larger than your task.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Inspirational Quotes for Work, Positive Motivation Quotes, Positive Short Quotes, Wednesday Motivational Quotes

10. “Conquer yourself and you can conquer everything else.”

— Orison Swett Marden

11. “Self-confidence carries conviction; it makes other people believe in us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

12. “Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.”

— Orison Swett Marden

13. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

14. “Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.”

— Orison Swett Marden

15. “Without continuous effort there cannot be continuous achievement.”

— Orison Swett Marden

16. “There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Respect Quotes

17. “Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Real Quotes

18. “Work, love and play are the great balance wheels of man’s being.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Quotes About Balance

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

— Orison Swett Marden

20. “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

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

— Orison Swett Marden

22. “Put yourself in your customer’s place.”

— Orison Swett Marden

23. “We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.”

— Orison Swett Marden

24. “Make every occasion a great occasion, for you can never tell who may be taking your measure for a higher place.”

— Orison Swett Marden

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

— Orison Swett Marden

26. “Live and let live is not enough; live and help live is not too much.”

— Orison Swett Marden

27. “The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is poorer. He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he is poor who though he has millions is covetous.”

— Orison Swett Marden

28. “Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Ambition Quotes, Being Strong Quotes

29. “Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt or thought has had its hand in molding us, shaping us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

30. “Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do.”

— Orison Swett Marden

31. “A woman who is self-reliant, positive, optimistic, and undertakes her work with the assurance of success magnetizes her condition. She draws to herself the creative powers of the universe.”

— Orison Swett Marden

32. “This is the test of your manhood: How much is there left in you after you have lost everything outside of yourself?”

— Orison Swett Marden

33. “Money, influence, and position are nothing compared with brains, principles, energy and perseverances.”

— Orison Swett Marden

34. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

35. “We lift ourselves by our own thought; we climb upon our vision of ourselves.”

— Orison Swett Marden

36. “Real happiness is so simple that most people do not recognize it. It is derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Real Quotes

37. “Opportunity always looks bigger going than coming.”

— Orison Swett Marden

38. “Ambition is the incentive that makes purpose GREAT and ACHIEVEMENT greater!”

— Orison Swett Marden

39. “All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.”

— Orison Swett Marden

40. “Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young. A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everybody around us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

41. “A man will remain a rag-picker as long as he has only the vision of a rag-picker.”

— Orison Swett Marden

42. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Featured in: Fun Quotes

43. “Most men fail, not through lack of education, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.”

— Orison Swett Marden

44. “Obstacles will look large or small to you according to whether you are large or small.”

— Orison Swett Marden

45. “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...”

— Orison Swett Marden

46. “The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.”

— Orison Swett Marden

47. “The best thing about giving of ourselves is that what we get is always better than what we give. The reaction is greater than the action.”

— Orison Swett Marden

48. “Doing common things uncommonly well.”

— Orison Swett Marden

49. “You will find the whole world will change to you when you change your attitude toward it.”

— Orison Swett Marden

50. “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