Browse 7 quotations connecting Orison Swett Marden with Growth, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include Architects of Fate, Cheerfulness as a Life Power, How to Succeed.
“The greatest worth is never measured.”
Marden distinguishes forms of personal value and character from the material measures that are easiest to count.
Architects of Fate; Project Gutenberg #21622. The sentence occurs in a passage criticizing narrow material measures of a life.
“A healthy, definite purpose is a remedy for a thousand ills which attend aimless lives.”
Marden argues that a clear purpose can organize attention and effort that would otherwise be scattered by aimlessness.
Architects of Fate; Project Gutenberg #21622. The claim is preserved as period motivational rhetoric, not presented as medical advice.
“It is not a question of what some one else can do or become, which every youth should ask himself, but what can I do?”
The question redirects comparison away from other people and toward the concrete development of one’s own abilities.
Architects of Fate; Project Gutenberg #21622. This record uses the opening portion of Marden’s longer self-development question.
“The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given to him.”
Marden defines success as developing one’s available capacities rather than merely matching another person’s achievements or circumstances.
Architects of Fate; Project Gutenberg #21622. Period gendered language is preserved as source wording rather than silently modernized.
“The simple truth is that a will strong enough to keep a man continually striving for things not wholly beyond his powers will carry him in time very far toward his chosen goal.”
Marden emphasizes sustained effort toward difficult but attainable aims, making persistence more important than a single burst of enthusiasm.
Architects of Fate, chapter discussion of will and purpose; Project Gutenberg #21622. The wording reflects nineteenth-century success literature.
“It is impossible to overestimate the importance of forming a habit of cheerfulness early in life.”
Marden emphasizes repetition and early habit formation as central to the cheerful disposition promoted throughout the book.
Cheerfulness as a Life Power; Project Gutenberg #18394. This is period self-development advice and is presented as Marden’s historical claim rather than a modern clinical prescription.
“Believe in yourself; you may succeed when others do not believe in you, but never when you do not believe in yourself.”
External encouragement can help, but Marden makes self-belief the non-substitutable part of action: progress is difficult when a person has already decided internally that success is impossible.
How to Succeed, chapter “Hold Up Your Head,” in the Project Gutenberg text; the book’s period language and success philosophy are preserved as historical self-development writing.
