Top 200 Orison Swett Marden Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.’”

— Orison Swett Marden

102. “Our trials, our sorrows, and our grieves develop us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

103. “Superiority – doing things a little better than anybody else can do them.”

— Orison Swett Marden

104. “All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.”

— Orison Swett Marden

105. “The glow of satisfaction which follows the consciousness of doing our level best never comes to a human being from any other experience.”

— Orison Swett Marden

106. “People do not realise the immense value of utilising spare minutes.”

— Orison Swett Marden

107. “Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe.”

— Orison Swett Marden

108. “Worry clogs the brain and paralyzes the thought. A troubled brain can not think clearly, vigorously, locally.”

— Orison Swett Marden

109. “The mill cannot grind with the water that has passed.”

— Orison Swett Marden

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

— Orison Swett Marden

111. “No man fails who does his best.”

— Orison Swett Marden

112. “We can give our smiles, our encouragement, our sympathy to someone who needs them every day of the year.”

— Orison Swett Marden

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

— Orison Swett Marden

114. “There is no law by which one can, as long as he thinks he can’t.”

— Orison Swett Marden

115. “A strong, successful man is not the victim of his environment. He creates favorable conditions. His own inherent force and energy compel things to turn out as he desires.”

— Orison Swett Marden

116. “Keep fear out of your child’s mind, as you would keep poison out of his body; for fear is the deadliest of mental poisons.”

— Orison Swett Marden

117. “The influential man is the successful man, whether he be rich or poor.”

— Orison Swett Marden

118. “What keeps so many people back is simply unwillingness to pay the price, to make the exertion, the effort to sacrifice their ease and comfort.”

— Orison Swett Marden

119. “No young man starting in life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more – to be happy and successful – than much money.”

— Orison Swett Marden

120. “Fear is a great robber of power. It paralyzes the thinking faculties, ruins spontaneity, enthusiasm, and self confidence. It has a blighting effect upon all one’s thoughts, moods, and efforts. It destroys ambition and efficiency.”

— Orison Swett Marden

121. “The world makes way for the man with an idea.”

— Orison Swett Marden

122. “The greatest thing a man can possibly do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other. It is not a question of what someone else can do or become which every youth should ask himself, but what can I do? How can I develop myself into the grandest possible manhood?”

— Orison Swett Marden

123. “Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.”

— Orison Swett Marden

124. “Pessimism has never done anything but tear down and destroy what optimism has built up.”

— Orison Swett Marden

125. “Even the men most richly endowed with ability, education, and opportunity, even the giants of the race, after the completest life possible, feel, as they stand on the edge of the grave, that they are but human acorns with all their possibilities still in them, just beginning to sprout.”

— Orison Swett Marden

126. “Power gravitates to the man who knows how.”

— Orison Swett Marden

127. “When a man feels throbbing within him the power to do what he undertakes as well as it can possibly be done, this is happiness, this is success.”

— Orison Swett Marden

128. “Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize her.”

— Orison Swett Marden

129. “The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.”

— Orison Swett Marden

130. “The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, their character-building power.”

— Orison Swett Marden

131. “The greatest trouble with most of us is that our demands upon ourselves are so feeble, the call upon the great within of us so weak and intermittent that it makes no impression upon the creative energies; it lacks the force that transmutes desires into realities.”

— Orison Swett Marden

132. “What are stumbling blocks and defeat to the weak and vacillating are but stepping stones to victory to the determined soul.”

— Orison Swett Marden

133. “You must bring every particle of your energy, unanswerable resolution, your best efforts, your persistent industry to your task or the best will not come out of you. You must back up your ambition by your whole nature, by unbounded enthusiasm and a determination to win which knows no failure.”

— Orison Swett Marden

134. “Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They have made the giants of our race by giving Titanic muscles, brawny sinews, and far-reaching intellects.”

— Orison Swett Marden

135. “It is what we do easily and what we like to do that we do well.”

— Orison Swett Marden

136. “You will never succeed while smarting under the drudgery of your occupation, if you are constantly haunted with the idea that you could succeed better in something else.”

— Orison Swett Marden

137. “Good cheer is a great lubricant; it oils all of life’s machinery.”

— Orison Swett Marden

138. “Laughter brightens the eye, increases the perspiration, expands the chest, forces the poisoned air from the least-used cells, and tends to restore that exquisite poise or balance which we call health.”

— Orison Swett Marden

139. “As long as a man faces life hopefully, confidently, triumphantly he is not a failure.”

— Orison Swett Marden

140. “The size of your accomplishments, the quality of your achievement, will depend very largely on how big a man you see in yourself, what sort of image you get of your possible self, yourself at your best.”

— Orison Swett Marden

141. “Every youth owes it to himself and to the world to make the most possible out of the stuff that is in him.”

— Orison Swett Marden

142. “The best books are those which lift us to a higher plane where we breathe a purer atmosphere.”

— Orison Swett Marden

143. “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education,” it was said by Professor Huxley, “is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson which ought to be learned, and, however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson which he learns thoroughly.”

— Orison Swett Marden

144. “It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that make the master’s fame.”

— Orison Swett Marden

145. “Let us open up our natures, throw wide the doors of our hearts and let in the sunshine of good will and kindness.”

— Orison Swett Marden

146. “It is like the seed put in the soil – the more one sows, the greater the harvest.”

— Orison Swett Marden

147. “Whatever our creed, we feel that no good deed can by any possibility go unrewarded, no evil deed unpunished.”

— Orison Swett Marden

148. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

149. “Many a man has finally succeeded only because he has failed after repeated efforts. If he had never met defeat he would never have known any great victory.”

— Orison Swett Marden

150. “No matter how humble your work may seem, do it in the spirit of an artist, of a master. In this way you lift it out of commonness and rob it of what would otherwise be drudgery.”

— Orison Swett Marden