5 quotations linked to Cheerfulness as a Life Power by or associated with Orison Swett Marden, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Cheerfulness, optimism, habits, patience, inward peace, business conduct and the deliberate cultivation of constructive attention.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“What is needed is a habit of cheerfulness, to enjoy every day as we go along.”
Marden treats cheerfulness as a repeated practice of attending to the current day rather than postponing all enjoyment to occasional breaks.
Source note: Cheerfulness as a Life Power, Foreword; Project Gutenberg #18394. Claims about health elsewhere in the book are period rhetoric and are not treated as modern medical evidence.
“Yet a habit of happy thought would transform his life into harmony and beauty.”
Marden’s claim reflects the book’s central period philosophy: repeated patterns of attention can alter how a person experiences ordinary life.
Source note: Cheerfulness as a Life Power; Project Gutenberg #18394. Context notes distinguish motivational rhetoric from modern psychological evidence.
“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.
Source note: 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.
“He who has learned the true art of living will not waste his energies in friction, which accomplishes nothing.”
The metaphor treats needless fretting and interpersonal friction as expenditure of energy that produces no useful result.
Source note: Cheerfulness as a Life Power; Project Gutenberg #18394. Marden is making a practical-moral argument, not a clinical claim.
“There is no investment a business man can make that will pay him a greater per cent, than patience and amiability.”
Marden applies temperament to commerce, arguing that patience and pleasant treatment of other people can have practical value in business relationships.
Source note: Cheerfulness as a Life Power; Project Gutenberg #18394. The sentence reflects late nineteenth-century business advice and period language.