W. Clement Stone

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – not the attitude of the prospect.

Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.