W. Clement Stone

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

To every disadvantage there is a corresponding advantage.

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

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.