Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Prentice Mulford

American Author and Literary Humorist, Helped found the New Thought Movement

"Keep your mind as much as you can from dwelling on your ailment. Think of strength and power and you will draw it to you. Think of health and you get it."

"Life means the development in us of powers and pleasures which fiction in its highest flights has never touched."

"Love is an element which though physically unseen is as real as air or water. It is an acting, living, moving force... it moves in waves and currents like those of the ocean."

"Men who cease to live in old methods and press forward to new, achieve the greatest financial success."

"Motherhood is a most necessary and an indispensable phase of existence for ripening and developing qualities."

"New thought is new life."

"No force is more subtle in its workings, nor more powerful to bring results for good or ill than the steady output of thought from one or several minds combined."

"No quality of mind is more needful to success in all undertakings than courage, and by courage I mean not only courage to act but courage to think."

"No real or lasting good comes of any gift bestowed on another unless the heart goes with it."

"None of us can expect to believe and live up to new laws, principles, or methods of life all at once. Though convinced of their truth, there is an unyielding, stubborn part of us which is hostile to them. That part is our material mind or mind of the body. There is a supreme power and ruling force which pervades and rules the boundless universe. You are a part of this power. You as a part have the faculty of bringing to you by constant silent desire, prayer, or demand more and more of the qualities, belongings, and characteristics of this power. Every thought of yours is a real thing--a force (say this over to yourself twice). Every thought of yours is literally building for you something for the future of good or ill."

"Nothing damages the individual more than self-deprecation, and many a child Is weighted down with the elements of failure before it goes into the world through years of scolding, snubbing, and telling it that it is a worthless being."

"Our thought is the unseen magnet, ever attracting its correspondence in things seen and tangible."

"Our unseen and unspoken thought is ever flowing from us, an element and force, real as the stream of water which we can see, or the current of electricity which we cannot see. It blends with the thought of others, and out of such combination new qualities of thought are formed, as in the mixture of chemicals there are formed new substances."

"Parents sometimes forget that after the child emerges from the utter physical and mental helplessness of infancy, it is becoming more and more an individual."

"Pleasure is the sure result of placing thought or force on the thing we are doing now, and pain of some sort in both present and future is the certain result of sending thought or force away from the act which needs to be done at this moment."

"Power comes of looking forward with hope - of expecting and demanding the better things to come. That is the law of the Infinite Mind, and when we follow it we live in that mind."

"Presents are expected from relatives, when to expect a gift makes it rather an extortion."

"Real gifts are always surprises. No one expects a surprise since expectation destroys surprise."

"The bigot of every age and creed has been the person thinking he could of himself make himself an angel."

"The character of thought which we think or put out affects our business favorably or unfavorably, It influences others for or against us. It is an element felt pleasantly or unpleasantly by others, inspiring them with confidence or distrust."

"The more impressionable you are to the thought about you the more are you liable to be thus affected."

"The prevailing state of mind, or character of thought, shapes the body and features. It makes us ugly or pleasing, attractive or repulsive to others. Our thought shapes our gestures, our mannerism, our walk. The least movement of muscle has a mood of mind, a thought, behind it. A mind always determined has always a determined walk. A mind always weak, shifting, vacillating and uncertain, makes a shuffling, shambling, uncertain gait. The spirit of determination braces every nerve and sinew; the thought-element of determination fills every muscle."

"The science of happiness lies in controlling our thought and getting thought from sources of healthy life."

"The surest way for a young woman to become ugly is to be discontented, peevish, cross, complaining and envious of others."

"There are thousands of things, events and scenes in your past life which it is more profitable to forget than to remember. By so forgetting you allow entrance for new idea, which is new life. By remembering you prevent the coming to you of such new idea and life."

"There is a sense in the tree which feels your love and responds to it. It does not respond or show its pleasure in our way or in any way we can now understand."

"There is a supreme power and ruling force which pervades and rules the boundless Universe. You are a part of this power."

"There is a vast amount of unconscious tyranny exercised through the ties of physical relationship."

"There is always a bit of fear where there is a bit of hurry."

"There is no chasm betwixt what we call the material and spiritual. Both are of substance or element. They blend imperceptibly into each other. In reality the material is only a visible form of the finer elements which we call spiritual."

"Thoughts are things."

"To learn to forget is as necessary and useful as to learn to remember. We think of many things every day which it would be more profitable not to think of at all. The ability to forget is the ability to drive away the unseen force (thought) which Is injuring us, and to change it for a force (or order of thought) which can benefit us."

"Ugliness of expression comes of unconscious transgressions of a law."

"We absorb the thought of those with whom we are most in sympathy and association. We graft their mind on our own. If their mind is inferior to ours and not on the same plane of thought, we, in such absorption, take in and cultivate an inferior and injurious mental graft. If you will keep company with people who are reckless and unaspiring, who have no aim or purpose in life, who have no faith in themselves or anything else, you place yourself in the thought current of failure. Your tendency then will be to failure. Because from such people, your closest associates, you will absorb their thought. If you absorb it, you will think it. You will get into the same mood of mind as theirs. If you think as they do, you will in many things find yourself acting as they do, no matter how great your mental gifts."

"We get the element of love only in proportion as we have it in us."

"We need to be careful of what we think and talk. Because thought runs in currents as real as those of air and water. Of what we think and talk we attract to us a like current of thought. This acts on mind or body for good or ill."

"When an evil is known it is half cured."

"When you say to yourself, 'I am going to have a pleasant visit or a pleasant journey,' you are literally sending elements and forces ahead of your body that will arrange things to make your visit or journey pleasant....Our thoughts, or in other words, our state of mind, is ever at work 'fixing up' things good or bad in advance."

"You can live neither healthfully nor comfortably, unless with those whose thought-atmosphere (a literal emanation from them) is similar to your own. Physical relationship may or may not furnish such at atmosphere. Compel a laboring man whose thought goes little beyond his eating, drinking and daily round of work, to live exclusively with a company of artists and philosophers, seeing none of his own kind and order of thought?"

"Your thoughts shape your face, and give it its peculiar expression. Your thoughts determine the attitude, carriage, and shape of your whole body. The law for beauty and the law for perfect health is the same. Both depend entirely on the state of your mind; or, in other words, on the kind of thoughts you most put out and receive. Ugliness of expression comes of unconscious transgressions of a law, be the ugliness in the young or the old. Any form of decay in a human body, any form of weakness, anything in the personal appearance of a man or woman which makes them repulsive to you, is because their prevailing mood of mind has made them so."