Great Throughts Treasury

"Our self-image strongly held essentially determines what we become."

"We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness."

"We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve."

"We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve."

"Our self image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other."

"If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone."

"You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search."

"What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live / with your self-respect alive and growing"

"Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act."

"To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior."

"One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center."

"When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative "success mechanism" within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or "willpower”."

"We are injured and hurt emotionally, Not so much by other people or what they say and don't say, But by our own attitude and our own response."

"Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead."

"People who say that life is not worthwhile are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals which are worthwhile. Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project. Always have something ahead of you to ''look forward to'' / to work for and hope for."

"Stand up to crises. Don't let them throw you! Fight to stay calm... even surmount the crisis completely and turn it into an opportunity. Refuse to renounce your self-image. No matter what happens, you must keep your good opinion of yourself. No matter what happens, you must hold your past successes in your imagination, ready for showing in the motion picture screen of your mind. No matter what happens, no matter what you lose, no matter what failures you must endure, you must keep faith in yourself. Then you can stand up to crises, with calm and courage, refusing to buckle; then you will not fall through the floor. You will be able to support yourself."

"Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person's feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel."

"Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability."

"Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward."

"Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome, for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, "It's no use - I can't do it”."

"Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment."

"Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent."

"Close scrutiny will show that most ''crisis situations'' are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are."

"Realizing that our actions, feelings and behaviour are the result of our own images and beliefs gives us the level that psychology has always needed for changing personality."

"It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear."

"Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself."

"You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you."

"This is where you will win the battle: in the playhouse of your mind."

"You can do only one thing at a time. I simply tackle one problem and concentrate all efforts on what I am doing at the moment."

"Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself."

"You are embarking on the greatest adventure of your life -- to improve your self-image, to create more meaning in your life and in the lives of others. This is your responsibility. Accept it, now!"

"You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut."

"Times will change for the better when you change."

"Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self."

"Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving."

"To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something."

"Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience."

"It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist."

"The ''self-image'' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior."

"He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution."

"Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism."

"Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied."

"Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today."

"It is the young man of little faith who says, 'I am nothing.' It is the young man of true conception who says, 'I am everything,' and then goes to prove it. That does not spell conceit or egotism, and if people think it does, let them think so. Enough for us to know that it means faith, trust, confidence, the human expression of the God within us. He says. 'Do my work.' Go and do it. No matter what it is. Do it, but do it with a zest; a keenness; a gusto that surmounts obstacles and brushes aside discouragement."

"Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby."

"Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on."

"Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome, for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, “It’s no use – I can’t do it."

"Failure feelings – fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence – do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate which means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind."

"Close scrutiny will show that most "crisis situations" are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are."