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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Prosperity & How to Attract It' by Orison Swett Marden, the author delves into the concept of prosperity and provides readers with insights on how to manifest abundance in their lives. Written in a clear and practical style, Marden explores the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction as tools for achieving success and prosperity. This book not only serves as a guide for personal development but also reflects the optimism and self-help movement of the early 20th century. Marden's uplifting and motivating words resonate with readers, urging them to take control of their destinies and create a life of abundance. Orison Swett Marden, a pioneer in the self-help genre, draws upon his own experiences and observations to offer timeless wisdom in 'Prosperity & How to Attract It'. As a successful author and founder of SUCCESS magazine, Marden's dedication to empowering individuals shines through in this influential work. His genuine desire to help others unlock their full potential is evident in every page, making this book a valuable resource for those seeking personal growth and prosperity. I highly recommend 'Prosperity & How to Attract It' to readers interested in harnessing the power of positive thinking and attracting abundance into their lives. Marden's timeless advice and inspirational teachings provide practical strategies for achieving success and fulfillment, making this book a must-read for those on a journey towards prosperity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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PROSPERITY & HOW TO ATTRACT IT
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Prosperity, Marden argues, is less a windfall than a force we cultivate by the thoughts we entertain, the character we build, and the service we render. Prosperity & How to Attract It by Orison Swett Marden belongs to the American self-help tradition of the early twentieth century, a period when restless ambition met new avenues for advancement. Written as practical counsel rather than speculative theory, it invites readers to exchange passivity for disciplined initiative. Its pages insist that external gain follows inner growth, not the reverse. While grounded in its era’s bustling commerce, the book addresses perennial doubts about luck, effort, and the true sources of enduring success.
Situated in the motivational genre, this work dispenses with fictional setting; its scene is the reader’s workshop, office, streetcar, and quiet hours of self-assessment. Marden writes in a confident, exhortative voice tempered by humane encouragement, favoring crisp maxims, illustrative anecdotes, and direct appeals to conscience. The prose moves briskly, yet it pauses to mark the ethical stakes of each decision. The guiding assumption is that prosperity is a composite of ability, attitude, and usefulness, and that each can be trained. The reading experience is that of a seasoned mentor pressing for action while reminding you that character, not convenience, must remain your compass.
The premise unfolds without plot: it is a sequence of arguments showing how outlook becomes habit, habit becomes conduct, and conduct attracts opportunity. Readers encounter reflections on ambition channeled by purpose, on the discipline that keeps effort steady, and on relationships that multiply capacity rather than drain it. The style blends practical steps with elevated aspiration, neither technocratic nor mystical. Expect concrete examples from business and civic life, used to make principles memorable rather than to celebrate celebrity. The tone alternates between warm reassurance and bracing challenge, producing a rhythm that invites self-scrutiny and renews the will to try again.
Among its central themes is the sovereignty of mental attitude: not as wishful thinking, but as a builder of attention, vigor, and endurance. Marden treats definiteness of aim as an antidote to scatter, urging readers to concentrate talent on work that benefits others. He emphasizes initiative, punctuality, and the quiet heroism of doing the next right task, while warning against the paralysis of complaint. Prosperity, in this view, gathers around courage, cheerfulness, and self-respect, which attract allies and opportunities. The book also rejects cynicism, proposing that hope is not naiveté but a discipline that keeps effort alive when outcomes are uncertain.
Equally prominent is the ethical dimension: prosperity is inseparable from integrity, service, and fair dealing. The argument is not merely that honesty is virtuous, but that it is strategically sound, sustaining reputation, trust, and the compounding advantages of reliability. Marden’s notion of wealth includes influence, usefulness, and the growth of one’s powers, so material success appears as a byproduct rather than the entire aim. He calls readers to invest in others’ advancement, to cultivate generosity, and to measure profit by the good left in one’s wake. In doing so, the book reframes ambition as stewardship and aligns gain with genuine contribution.
For contemporary readers, its relevance lies in its clarity about agency amid complexity. In an age of shifting careers, technological volatility, and competing narratives of luck versus structure, Marden’s counsel to shape habits, choose companions wisely, and produce unmistakable value remains actionable. The emphasis on purpose, focus, and disciplined optimism resonates with modern insights about attention, resilience, and social capital, without requiring specialized jargon. Readers can translate his guidance into today’s contexts—entrepreneurship, creative work, or mission-driven service—by treating character as infrastructure. The book neither denies obstacles nor romanticizes ease; it insists that steadied aspiration still organizes a meaningful path forward.
Approached on its own terms, Prosperity & How to Attract It offers more than formulas: it proposes an ethos that turns aspiration into daily practice. Without relying on sensational promises, it invites readers to audit their motives, align their work with service, and persist with cheerful tenacity. The result is a reading experience that is brisk yet reflective, pragmatic yet high-minded, and carefully protective of the reader’s dignity. You will not find suspense or secrets, but a cumulative argument for self-mastery in the service of usefulness. That argument, lucid and firm, continues to illuminate how true prosperity is made and kept.
Synopsis
Prosperity & How to Attract It is Orison Swett Marden’s practical meditation on wealth, opportunity, and character. Written in the tradition of early twentieth-century American self-help, it argues that prosperity is chiefly a result of disciplined thinking, purposeful effort, and ethical conduct rather than luck. Marden frames prosperity broadly, including financial security, usefulness, and inner poise, and sets out to show how attitudes and habits shape outcomes. The book advances an orderly program: cultivate a constructive mind, define a worthy aim, fit yourself for effective work, and align daily behavior with principles that make one indispensable to others and receptive to opportunity.
Opening chapters stress the power of mental attitude in attracting results. Marden contends that confidence, hope, and a forward-looking imagination enlarge one’s field of action, while fear and worry constrict it. He treats optimism not as naïveté but as a working method that keeps attention fixed on possibilities and solutions. By disciplining thought, selecting encouraging influences, and refusing to dwell on failure, readers begin to notice and create chances that were previously overlooked. The book links inner climate to outward behavior, arguing that expectations influence choices, persistence, and the impression one makes, thereby drawing favorable associations and responsibilities.
From attitude the discussion moves to aim. Prosperity begins with a definite purpose, honestly chosen and patiently pursued. Marden urges readers to study their aptitudes, select a vocation where they can render exceptional service, and organize their lives around mastery. He emphasizes steady self-education through reading, observation, and practice, together with careful use of time and formation of constructive habits. Efficiency, accuracy, and thoroughness are presented as multipliers of opportunity. The author insists that preparation creates the conditions under which luck seems to appear, making advancement less a surprise than the natural outcome of fitness and readiness.
A central strand of the book is the claim that character is capital. Marden ties enduring prosperity to honesty, reliability, and fairness, asserting that trust is a working asset that attracts partners, clients, and employers. He frames business as a form of service and urges readers to seek ways to increase others’ welfare, since usefulness invites demand. Courtesy, punctuality, and clean dealing are repeatedly advanced as practical advantages. Reputation, once earned through consistent conduct, operates like credit, widening one’s scope. In this view, wealth follows value given, and shortcuts that sacrifice integrity erode the very foundation of success.
The counsel then turns to initiative and the habit of exceeding expectations. Marden encourages readers to do more than they are paid for, to anticipate needs, and to assume responsibility without waiting for instruction. Such behavior, he argues, naturally leads to advancement because it displays dependability and enlarges competence. Setbacks are treated as tests that can strengthen will and resourcefulness when met with courage. By converting obstacles into occasions for ingenuity, one gradually acquires influence. The narrative underscores perseverance, steadiness under pressure, and a refusal to be disheartened as recurring traits of those who attract larger opportunities.
Practical chapters address the management of resources and conditions that support achievement. Marden recommends economy in personal habits, the prompt payment of obligations, and the steady building of savings to create independence and margin for enterprise. He treats health, cleanliness, and orderly surroundings as productive assets, urging attention to sleep, exercise, and temperance. Because environment shapes aspiration, he advises choosing uplifting associates and mentors, cultivating clear speech and neat appearance, and keeping one’s word in small matters. These disciplines, though modest in themselves, accumulate into a reputation and reserve power that make one ready when occasions for advancement appear.
The book closes by uniting its themes into a vision of prosperity as the natural harvest of right thinking, right purpose, and right service. Rather than promising quick formulas, Marden offers a sustained argument for personal agency grounded in ethics, preparation, and steadfast cheerfulness. His program suggests that when inner life and outward conduct mutually reinforce each other, opportunities gravitate toward the prepared person and benefits extend beyond the individual to family and community. As a statement of early modern success philosophy, it endures for its insistence that genuine prosperity is cumulative, participatory, and inseparable from character.
Historical Context
Prosperity & How to Attract It arises from the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era United States, when industrialization and mass print culture were reshaping everyday life. Its author, Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924), a New Hampshire–born physician-turned-writer, founded Success magazine in 1897 and became a prominent voice in American self-help. His work addressed readers facing new corporate hierarchies, expanding sales networks, and proliferating small enterprises. Rooted in a moral uplift tradition traceable to Benjamin Franklin and popularized by nineteenth-century success manuals, the book channels a distinctly American belief that disciplined habits and clear purpose could convert opportunity into prosperity.
The economic backdrop included volatile booms and busts that sharpened public interest in personal financial security. The Panic of 1893 and the Panic of 1907 exposed vulnerabilities in credit and speculation, even as trusts and large corporations consolidated power. Antitrust sentiment, embodied in the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and later enforcement under Theodore Roosevelt, signaled an effort to tame concentrated capital. In this environment, practical counsel on resilience, thrift, and initiative found a wide audience. Marden’s emphasis on self-mastery and confidence answered anxieties about employment stability and advancement in a rapidly modernizing, increasingly corporate economy.
The book also reflects currents in popular philosophy and religion that highlighted the efficacy of thought and character. Late nineteenth-century New Thought, represented by writers like Ralph Waldo Trine, taught that constructive thinking could affect material outcomes. At the same time, the Protestant ethic of diligence, honesty, and frugality remained culturally authoritative. Influences from earlier self-help, notably Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), permeated American advice literature. Marden drew upon these streams while staying practical and nonsectarian, urging readers to cultivate mental attitude, purpose, and integrity as instruments for prosperity rather than relying solely on luck or inherited status.
Educational and institutional changes reinforced the appeal of prescriptive literature. The spread of public high schools, the growth of Carnegie-funded libraries, and adult-education platforms like the Chautauqua movement expanded access to books and lectures on improvement. Business education advanced with the founding of the Wharton School (1881) and Harvard Business School (1908), while correspondence schools such as International Correspondence Schools (1891) opened vocational pathways. Concurrently, scientific management, popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), emphasized efficiency. Marden’s approach complemented these trends, focusing on personal discipline and character as the foundation for acquiring and sustaining wealth.
A flourishing magazine economy amplified the reach of success ideals. Mass-circulation periodicals like McClure’s and the Saturday Evening Post popularized profiles of innovators and executives, while muckrakers investigated corporate abuses. Success magazine, launched by Marden in 1897, mixed inspirational biography, practical advice, and commentary on enterprise. Many of his ideas initially appeared as essays or profiles before being expanded into books. The approachable, anecdote-rich style of this media ecosystem shaped Prosperity & How to Attract It, which favors illustrative cases and concise maxims designed for readers juggling work, study, and ambition amid the tempo of urban, industrial life.
Contemporary models of upward mobility supplied both inspiration and a template. Horatio Alger Jr.’s rags-to-respectability tales, Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth (1889), and Russell H. Conwell’s widely delivered “Acres of Diamonds” lecture promoted perseverance and opportunity. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) placed self-help within a broader debate over race and progress. These works informed a culture that valorized personal initiative. Marden’s book aligns with this canon, arguing that prosperity can be cultivated through mindset and conduct, while largely framing success in terms accessible to clerks, salespeople, small proprietors, and aspiring professionals.
Workplace and demographic shifts also shaped readers’ expectations. Immigration swelled the labor force; unions such as the American Federation of Labor (founded 1886) organized skilled workers; and major strikes in the 1890s spotlighted tensions over wages and conditions. Meanwhile, office technologies—the typewriter, telephone, and filing systems—created white-collar roles for both men and women. The diffusion of consumer credit and national advertising expanded markets for individual enterprise. Within this environment, Marden emphasized initiative, reliability, and optimism as portable assets that could help readers navigate competition, volatile markets, and the hierarchical structures of modern firms.
Prosperity & How to Attract It encapsulates Progressive Era confidence in self-direction while sidestepping exhaustive analysis of structural barriers. Its insistence on purpose, cheerfulness, and steady effort mirrors contemporary faith in moral suasion and personal reform. Yet it also responds to real uncertainties produced by panics, trusts, and technological change by offering a portable code of conduct for advancement. As such, the work both reflects and helps construct the period’s success ethos: an optimistic, character-centered credo that promised readers a practical route to dignity, stability, and prosperity in an unsettled age.
PROSPERITY & HOW TO ATTRACT IT
Chapter I. How We Limit Our Supply
"A man will remain a ragpicker[1] as long as he has only a ragpicker's vision."
Why go thru life exhibiting the traits of an underling? If you are a real man, don't go around looking like a beggar, talking like a beggar, acting like a beggar.
Only by thinking prosperity and abundance can you realize the abundant, prosperous life.
Fixing limitation upon ourselves is one of the cardinal sins of mankind.
Prosperity flows only through channels that are wide open to receive it. Doubt, fear and lack of confidence close these channels.
A pinched mind means a pinched, limited supply. Everything we get in life comes through the gateway of our thought.
If that is pinched, stingy, mean, what flows to us will correspond.
What would you think of a prince, the heir to a kingdom of limitless wealth and power, who should live in the condition of a pauper, who should go about the world bemoaning his hard fate and telling people how poor he was, saying that he didn't believe his father was going to leave him anything, and that he might as well make up his mind to a life of poverty and limitations?
You would say, of course, that he must be insane, and that his hard conditions, his poverty and limitations, were not actual, but imaginary; that they existed only in his mind; that his father was ready to load him with good things, with all that his heart desired, if he would only open his mind to the truth and live in the condition befitting a prince, the son and heir of a great king.
Now, if you are living in pinching poverty, in a narrow, cramped, limited environment in which there seems to be no hope, no outlook for better things; if you are not getting what you want, though working hard for it, you are just as foolish as the prince who, believing that he was poor, lived like a pauper in the midst of his father's limitless wealth.
Your limitations are in your mind, just as the prince's were in his.
You are the child of a Father who has created abundance, limitless wealth, for all of His children, but your pinched, limited, poverty-stricken thought shuts you out from all this abundance and keeps you in poverty.
A Russian laborer named Mihok, living in Omaha, Nebraska, had carried a "luck" stone in his pocket for twenty years, never guessing that it had any monetary value.
Time and again friends, who thought that it might be more than an ordinary stone, suggested that he have it examined by a jeweler. He obstinately refused until, finally, they became so insistent that he sent the stone to a Chicago jeweler, who pronounced it a pigeon-blood ruby, the largest of its kind in the world.
It weighed 24 karats and was worth $100,000!
There are millions like this poor day laborer, living in poverty, thinking that there is nothing for them but hard work and more poverty who, without knowing it, are carrying in the great within of themselves possibilities of wealth beyond their dreams.
Their wrong thinking is robbing them of their divine inheritance; shutting off the abundant supply provided for them by the Omnipotent Source of all supply.
The majority of people are in the position of a man who went out to water his garden, but inadvertently stepped on the hose, shutting off the water supply.
He had a big hose and was very much annoyed, very much disappointed, because he was getting only a mere dribble of water when he had every right to expect — and should get: — a liberal flow.
Water was at the source in abundance, ready to supply his needs; only one thing was at fault, the man himself was pinching his supply, limiting it to a miserable drizzle. He was standing on the hose and didn't know it.
That is literally what all who are living in grinding poverty are doing.
They are pinching their supply by stepping upon the hose through which plenty would come to them. They are stopping the flow of abundance that is their birthright, by their doubts, their fears, their unbelief; by visualizing poverty, thinking poverty, acting as if they never expected to have anything, to accomplish anything, or to be anything.
Everything in man's life, everything in God's universe, is based upon principle — follows a divine law; and the law of prosperity and abundance is just as definite as the law of gravitation, just as unerring as the principles of mathematics. It is a mental law.
Only by thinking abundance can you realize the abundant, prosperous life that is your birthright; in other words, according to your thought will be your life, your supply, or your lack.
Your mental attitude will be flung back to you, every time, in kind.
A poverty-stricken mental attitude will bring only poverty-stricken conditions to you. We are the creatures of our convictions. We cannot get beyond what we believe we are; what we believe we have.
Hence, if we think that we are never going to be strong or well like other people, or to be successful in our calling, we never will be.
If we are convinced that we will always be poor, we will be. You can't get'away from poverty when you don't expect to; when you don't believe that you are going to.
Many of the people who are living in poverty today never really expect anything else. Their fixed belief that they can never become prosperous keeps them in poverty; that is, it keeps their minds negative, and the mind cannot create, cannot produce, in this condition.
It is only the positive mind that can create prosperity; the negative mind is noncreative, non-productive; it can only tear down, inhibit, prevent the inflow of the good things that we long for.
It is not so much what you do with your hands as what you do with your mind that counts. Everything that has been accomplished by the hand or brain of man had its birth in the mind. The universe itself is the creation of Divine Mind.
A hard-working man who longs for prosperity, but is headed in the other direction mentally, who doesn't believe he is going to be prosperous, is neutralizing his hard work by his negative, destructive thought; he is standing on the hose that connects with his supply.
When you limit yourself in your thought, you are limiting yourself outwardly in a way which corresponds with your mental attitude, because you are obeying a law which is unchangeable.
You will notice that the man who puts a nickel in the contribution box, is not only stingy, close, and mean in all his money matters, but his face, his whole person, has a cramped, worried, pinched look. He is forever saving pennies, watching out for little things and never doing big things.
No matter how much natural ability he has, his narrow, limited, poverty thought dwarfs him and cuts off his stream of supply. He cannot do big things because he never thinks big things.
His warped mind will admit only a pinched supply instead of the big flow that is literally at his command.
It is because we have not learned how to use our thought forces that most of us go about like paupers, never glimpsing the marvelous inheritance left us by the All-supply, the All-good. Our parsimonious thought pinches our supply.
We often wonder why it is that certain people, in apparently no better circumstances than we are, get so much better things than we do; why they always insist upon and receive the best of everything. We never see them wearing cheap things — never see cheap things in their homes, or any pinching anywhere.
They buy the best food, the best fruits and vegetables in the market, and everything else in accordance. We think they are extravagant when we compare what they pay for things with what we pay for things of the same kind, and we pride ourselves that we are economizing and saving what they are wasting. But, are we?
How does our manner of living compare with theirs? Does the enjoyment we get out of life measure up to what they get? Do the few dollars we save compensate for the great lack in our lives — the lack of good food, of proper clothing, of the little pleasure trips, the social enjoyments, the picnics and various diversions which make life pleasant, healthful, and above all, much more productive for the neighbors whose extravagance we condemn?
As a matter of fact, our skimped, pinching policy leaves us poorer in the end.
Prosperity flows only through channels that are wide open to receive it. It does not flow through channels pinched by the poverty thought, by discouragement, doubt, or fear, or by a strangling narrow-visioned policy. A generous expenditure is often the wisest economy, the only thing that brings a generous success.
If a great manufacturer like Henry Ford, a great merchant like John Wanamaker, a big railroad manager, or other business man, should lose his broad vision and wide outlook; should begin to skimp on necessary output; should substitute inferior goods and men and service for the best; should reverse his policy, changing from a broad, generous one to a narrow, stingy one, he would soon find his business dwindling away to nothing.
There is no changing the principle of the law of supply. Whatever your business, your profession or occupation, or your circumstances, your mental attitude will determine your success or failure. A pinched mind means a pinched supply.
It means that you try to tap the great fountainhead of supply with a gimlet and then expect to get an abundant supply. That is impossible. Your mental attitude gauges the How of your supply.
Chapter II. The Law of Attraction
By the law of affinity you may know that your own is always seeking you if you are" seeking it With all your might and are not driving it away with your doubts.
John Burroughs[2] thus beautifully expressed this: "I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, For lo, my own shall come to me. "Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me.
"What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, What is mine shall know my face.
"Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high Can keep my own away from me."
It was never intended that God's children should ever want for anything[1q].
We live in the very lap of abundance; there is plenty of everything all about us, the great cosmic universe is packed with all sorts of beautiful, marvelous things, glorious riches, ready for our use and enjoyment.
Everything the human heart can crave, the great creative Intelligence offers us. We can draw from this vast ocean of intelligence everything we wish: all that it is necessary for us to do is to obey the law of attraction, — like attracts like.
To realize prosperity and abundance does not depend upon man's own little brain, his own little one-sided efforts.
It is a question of his making his mind a magnet to attract the things he wants, to attract his desires.
Everything that the race enjoys has been attracted out of the great ocean of intelligence according to a law. All inventions, all discoveries, all the marvelous facilities of civilization, — our hospitals, our schools, our churches, our libraries, and other institutions, our homes, with their comforts and luxuries, — have all been attracted from this great cosmic storehouse of intelligence by the same law.
It was intended that our longings, our yearnings, our legitimate desires should be satisfied, that our dreams should come true. It is our ignorance of the law that would bring our own to us which keeps it from us.
When you were a boy experimenting with your little steel magnet, didn't you often try to make it pick up wood, copper, rubber, or some other substance different from itself?
And, of course, you found it would not, because it had no affinity for things that were unlike itself. You found that it would pick up a needle but not a toothpick. In other words you demonstrated the law that — Like attracts like.
Not a day passes that we do not see this law demonstrated in different ways in human life.
Sometimes the demonstrations are very tragic. Only a short time ago a little eight-year-old girl, the daughter of a Pennsylvania farmer, died from fright in a dentist's chair, where she had been placed to have a tooth extracted. Although the child knew nothing about the law, it worked just the same; and, Like Job, the thing she feared had come to her.
By the operation of the same law that draws to us disease and death, we draw to ourselves poverty or opulence, success or failure. The mind at any given time is a magnet for something.
It is a magnet for whatever thought, whatever convictions dominate the mind at the time, and the blessed, glorious thing about it all is that we can determine what the mind shall attract, what sort of a magnet it shall become.
Now, you may attract to you that which is not good for you, that which will damn you, that which will pain and humiliate.
By concentrating upon and working for it you become a specialist in that line and the law of attraction brings it to you.
If you have a prosperity mental attitude, if you have a vigorous faith that you are going to get away from poverty, that you are going to demonstrate prosperity, abundance, and strive intelligently and persistently to realize your vision, you will do so. That's the law. If you obey the law you will get good results.
If we could only see a picture of the mental processes of whatever is held in the mind, pulling the things which correspond to our thought; if we could see more failure, more bad business, more debts, more losses starting towards us because we have contacted with these things in our thought, we would quit worrying about the things we don't want and think the things we do want, attracting more instead of less, attracting abundance instead of poverty, prosperity instead of failure.
Oh, how often we make our mind a magnet to attract all sorts of enemy thoughts, poverty thoughts, sick thoughts, fear thoughts, and worry thoughts, and then somehow we expect that a miracle will be performed, and that out of these negative causes we will be sure in some way to enjoy positive results.
No miracle could perform such a change as this. Results correspond with causes.
Before we can be conquered by poverty, we must, first of all, be poor mentally. The poverty thought, the acceptance of a poverty-stricken environment as an inevitable condition from which you cannot get away, keeps you in the poverty current and draws more poverty to you.
It is the operation of the same law which attracts good things, a better environment, to those who think abundance, prosperity, who are convinced that they are going to be well off, and work confidently, hopefully, toward that end.
Not the things we long for most, not the things we wish for, but our own, that which has lived in our thoughts and mind, dominated in our mentality, in our mental attitude, that is what the law of attraction brings to us.
It may be that this law has brought us the very things we hated and wanted to get rid of, but we have dwelt upon them, and, because they formed the mental model, the life processes built them into our lives.
The law of attraction often brings us hated bedfellows, but they have lived so long in our minds, that they must become a part of our lives, by the very law that like attracts like.
Until recently many of us did not understand what Job meant when he said, "The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me." Now we know that he expressed a psychological law that is as inexorable as the laws of mathematics.
We know that the things we fear most, the things we have a horror of and want to flee from, we are really pursuing by our very fear of them. By predicting them and visualizing them in our minds, we are attracting them to ourselves, and when we do this we are turning our backs upon the very things which we long for most.
The time will come when the law of attraction will be known as the greatest power in creation. This is the law upon which all successes, all characters, all lives are built.
Mental attraction is the only power upon which we can build anything successfully.
It is an inevitable law, an inexorable principle, that everything attracts to itself everything else like itself, that all affinities tend to get together, and when you make your mind a magnet it will attract according to its quality, according to your mental vision, your thoughts, your motives, your dominant attitude.
The saying "Money attracts money" is only another way of stating the law, — "like attracts like." The prosperous classes think prosperity, believe in it, work for it, never for a moment doubt their right to have all the money and all the good things they need, and of course they get them.
They are living up to the very letter and spirit of the law of attraction. A Rockefeller, a Schwab, uses this law in a masterly way to amass a large fortune.
The newsboy uses the same law in selling his newspapers, running a news-stand and climbing gradually to the mayoralty of his city or town. We all use this law of attraction no matter whether we know it or not.
We use it every instant of our lives.
Many people wonder that bad men, wicked men, vicious men are successful in business, at money making, in amassing a fortune, while the good man, the upright man, doesn't seem to be able to make any headway.
They haven't the knack of accumulation in the way of making money. Good things do not seem to come to them. If they make an investment they almost always lose; they buy in the wrong market, or sell in the wrong market.
Now, a man's morals do not have anything specially to do with his money-making faculties, except that honesty is always and everywhere the best business policy. It is just a question of obeying the law of accumulation, the law that like attracts like.
A very bad man may obey the law of accumulation, the law of attraction, and accumulate a vast fortune. If he is honest, his other defects and immoralities, his viciousness, will not hinder the working of the law. The law is unmoral — it is neither moral nor immoral.
Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.
They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.
We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind.
That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.
Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice.
Everything has power to attract its kind. The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.
Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself.
There is no exception to this law. The law cannot pity or help you if you break a bone, or are injured, any more than the law of electricity can help you when you abuse it. It will kill you if you break the law.
To think about and worry about the things we do not want, or to fear that they will come to us, is but to invite them; because every impression becomes an expression, or tends to become so unless the impression is neutralized by its opposite.
If we think too much about our losses, too much about our possible failure, all these things will tend to bring to us the very thing we are trying to get away from.
On every hand we see this law of like attracting like exemplified in the lives of the poverty-stricken multitudes, who, through ignorance of the law, keep themselves in their unfortunate condition by saturating their minds with the poverty idea; thinking and acting and talking poverty; living in the belief in its permanency; fearing, dreading, and worrying about it.
They do not realize, no one has ever told them, that as long as people mentally see the hunger wolf at the door and the poorhouse ahead of them; as long as they expect nothing but lack and poverty and hard conditions, they are headed toward these things; they are making it impossible for prosperity to come in their direction.
The way to attract prosperity and drive poverty out of the life is to work in harmony with the law instead of against it.
To expect prosperity, to believe with all your heart, no matter how present conditions may seem to contradict, that you are going to become prosperous, that you are already so, is the very first condition of the law of attaining what you desire.
You cannot get it by doubting or fearing. Whatever we visualize and work for we will get.
What we most frequently visualize, what we think most about, is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our lives, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things to us.
It doesn't matter whether they are things we fear and try to avoid or things that are good for us, that we long to get. Keeping them in mind increases our affinity for them and inevitably tends to bring them into our lives.
It is a curious fact that many people seem to think that one must spend years as an apprentice to become an expert in any line of endeavor, in business or in a profession, but that in regard to prosperity it is largely a matter of chance, of fate, something which cannot be affected very much by anything they may be able to do.
They say, "Well, I was not built that way. I am not a natural money-maker, and never can be." Or they excuse themselves on the ground that their parents and those before them were never money-makers, and never did anything more than make a bare living.
There is nothing at all peculiar about prosperity any more than there is about legal efficiency or expertness in law or medicine.
Its realization is purely a matter of concentration and of preparation; a matter of focusing all our powers upon the prosperity law in order to attract prosperity and to make ourselves expert in attaining it.
The law of prosperity, of opulence, is just as definite as the law of gravitation, and it works just as unerringly. Its first principle is mental. Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.
If you would attract success, keep your mind saturated with the success idea. Develop an attitude of mind that will attract success. When you think success, when you act it, when you live it, when you talk it, when it is in your bearing, then you are attracting it.
When we once get this law of attraction thoroughly fixed in our minds we will be careful about attracting our enemies, contacting with them through our mind, thinking about them, worrying about them, fearing, and dreading them.
We will hold the sort of thoughts that will attract the things we long for and are seeking, not the things we dread, and despise, and are trying to avoid.
It is just as easy to attract what you want as to attract what you don't want. It is just a question of holding the right thought, and making the right effort.
There is no exception to the law of attraction, any more than there is to the law of gravitation, or the laws of mathematics.
Chapter III. Driving Away Prosperity
As long as you hold the poorhouse[3] thought you are heading toward the poorhouse. A pinched, stingy thought means a pinched, stingy supply.
The man who sows failure thoughts, poverty thoughts, can no more reap success, prosperity harvests, than a farmer can get a wheat crop from sowing thistles.
No matter how hard you may work, if you keep your mind saturated with poverty thoughts, poverty pictures, you are driving away the very thing you are pursuing.
Stop thinking trouble if you want to attract its opposite; stop thinking poverty if you wish to attract plenty. Refuse to have anything to do with the things you fear, the things you do not want.
It is doubting and facing the wrong way, facing towards the black, depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and paralyzes ambition.
A man once told me that if he could be assured that he would never have to go to the poorhouse, and that he would have the necessities of life for his family, he would be perfectly satisfied.
