Top 200 Orison Swett Marden Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The world takes us at our own valuation. It believes in the man who believes in himself, but it has little use for the timid man, the one who is never certain of himself; who cannot rely on his own judgment, who craves advice from others, and is afraid to go ahead on his own account.”

— Orison Swett Marden

152. “No matter how many obstacles may block your path, or how dark the way, if you look up, think up, and struggle up, you can’t help succeeding. Whatever you do for a living, whatever fortune or misfortune, hold the victorious attitude and push ahead.”

— Orison Swett Marden

153. “The secret of happiness is in a cheerful, contented mind. He is poor who is dissatisfied; he is rich who is contented with what he has, and can enjoy what others own.”

— Orison Swett Marden

154. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

155. “Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.”

— Orison Swett Marden

156. “What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the head and heart?”

— Orison Swett Marden

157. “There is only one thing for us to do, and that is to do our level best right where we are every day of our lives; To use our best judgment, and then to trust the rest to that Power which holds the forces of the universe in his hands.”

— Orison Swett Marden

158. “Character: the grandest thing in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

159. “We lend power to the things we fear!”

— Orison Swett Marden

160. “Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the opportunity will only make you ridiculous. A great occasion is valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to make use of it.”

— Orison Swett Marden

161. “We fail to see that we can control our destiny; make ourselves do whatever is possible; make ourselves become whatever we long to be.”

— Orison Swett Marden

162. “Resolve that whatever you do, you will bring the whole man to it; that you will fling the whole weight of your being into it.”

— Orison Swett Marden

163. “Wisdom will not open her doors to those who are not willing to pay the price in self-sacrifice, in hard work. Her jewels are too precious to scatter before the idle, the ambitionless.”

— Orison Swett Marden

164. “Who would have ever heard of Theodore Roosevelt outside of his immediate community if he had only half committed himself? The great secret of his career was that he has flung his whole life with all the determination and energy he could muster.”

— Orison Swett Marden

165. “Wisdom is knowledge which has become a part of one’s being.”

— Orison Swett Marden

166. “Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power.”

— Orison Swett Marden

167. “They may well fear fate who have any infirmity of habit or aim: but they who rest on what is have a destiny beyond destiny, and can make mouths of fortune.”

— Orison Swett Marden

168. “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.”

— Orison Swett Marden

169. “It is the youth who sees a great opportunity hidden in just these simple services, who sees a very uncommon situation, a humble position, who gets on in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

170. “Analyzing what you haven’t got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.”

— Orison Swett Marden

171. “Let your air be that of a winner, a man who is resolved to make his way in the world, to make himself stand for something.”

— Orison Swett Marden

172. “The moment man cuts himself off from living connection with the human race and its needs, he begins to die from poor circulation.”

— Orison Swett Marden

173. “The divine injunction to be perfect, even as He is perfect, was not given man to mock him. The possibility of our waking in His likeness is literally true.”

— Orison Swett Marden

174. “Specialize or fail.”

— Orison Swett Marden

175. “The best legacy a man can leave his children is the memory and influence of a large, broad, finely developed mentality, a well-disciplined, highly cultured mind, a sweet, beautiful character which has enriched everybody who came in contact with it, a refined personality, a magnanimous spirit.”

— Orison Swett Marden

176. “Your suspicion attracts suspicion. Jealousy brings more jealousy, hate more hate, just as love brings love to meet it, as friendliness brings more friendliness, as sympathy and good will toward all draw the same to you from others and increase your popularity and magnetic power.”

— Orison Swett Marden

177. “And above all, study, study, study ! All the genius in the world will not help you along with any art unless you become a hard student. It.”

— Orison Swett Marden

178. “You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing.”

— Orison Swett Marden

179. “The habit of learning to appreciate to the utmost every situation in life adds wonderfully to the sum total of one’s happiness. But many people are incapable of real happiness because they never learn to appreciate anything except that which appeals to their own comfort, pleasure, or appetite.”

— Orison Swett Marden

180. “Opportunity becomes invisible to those who are doing nothing, or looking somewhere else for it.”

— Orison Swett Marden

181. “Real happiness comes from the cultivation, the development, of the highest that is in us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

182. “If we get the good that belongs to us here and now, we must extract the sweetness of each passing minute while it is ours. That is the real art of living in the today.”

— Orison Swett Marden

183. “That disables a lot of people from achieving goals, it is simply, a lack of willingness to pay for these goals, a lack of willingness to make great effort, a lack of willingness to sacrifice their comfort for those goals.”

— Orison Swett Marden

184. “Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.”

— Orison Swett Marden

185. “It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.”

— Orison Swett Marden

186. “Character is power, and is the best advertisement in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

187. “Resolve that you will be the master and not the slave of circumstances.”

— Orison Swett Marden

188. “What a great discrepancy there is between people and the results they achieve! It is due to the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability, and concentrating them upon one point.”

— Orison Swett Marden

189. “The things that come from others correspond with what we send to them.”

— Orison Swett Marden

190. “If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself.”

— Orison Swett Marden

191. “You must have birds in your heart, Madam, before you can find them in the bushes,” said John Burroughs, the great naturalist, to a woman who complained that no birds ever came to her orchard, while he counted a score or more there, even while she uttered her plaint.”

— Orison Swett Marden

192. “A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everyone around us.”

— Orison Swett Marden

193. “No man ever climbed to success on another’s back.”

— Orison Swett Marden

194. “Let the adverse breath of criticism be to you only what the blast of the storm wind is to the eagle, – a force against him that lifts him higher.”

— Orison Swett Marden

195. “The universe is one great kindergarten. 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 our soul.”

— Orison Swett Marden

196. “Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.”

— Orison Swett Marden

197. “Nothing is more foolish, nothing more wicked than to drag the skeletons of the past, the hideous images, the foolish deeds, the unfortunate experiences of yesterday into today’s work to mar and spoil it. There are plenty of people who have been failures up to the present moment who could do wonders in the future if they only could forget the past, if they only had the ability to cut it off, to close the door on it forever and start anew.”

— Orison Swett Marden

198. “Most of us do not prepare for a large career because we do not expect enough of ourselves.”

— Orison Swett Marden

199. “A fatal penalty awaits those who always look on the dark side of everything, who are always predicting evil and failure, who see only the seamy, disagreeable side of life. They draw upon themselves what they see, what they look for.”

— Orison Swett Marden

200. “Habit works powerfully for or against us. It is a good servant, but a tyrannical master. If.”

— Orison Swett Marden