Orison Swett Marden

Who was Orison Swett Marden?

Dr. Orison Swett Marden was an American inspirational author who wrote on success in life and how to achieve it. His writings discuss common-sense principles and virtues that make for a well-rounded, successful life. Many of his ideas are based on New Thought philosophy.

His first book, Pushing to the Front, became an instant best-seller and remains a classic in the genre of self-help. Marden later published fifty or more books and booklets, averaging two titles per year.

Marden had an unusual ability to strike a chord with his readers, encouraging them with hope and firing them with ambition to achieve. The privations of his childhood and youth, his broad education and his wide business experience in early manhood were factors that enabled him to write with understanding, sympathy and depth. Marden died in 1924 at the age of seventy-four.

Famous Quotes:

• 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.
• 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.
• This is the test of your manhood: How much is there left in you after you have lost everything outside of yourself?
• 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.
• Opportunities? They are all around us... There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
• But how shall I get ideas? Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind -- Act!
• There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.
• If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.
• 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.
• Superiority -- doing things a little better than anybody else can do them.