Napoleon Hill was an American self-help author. He is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937), which is among the best-selling self-help books of all time. Hill’s works insisted that fervid expectations are essential to improving one’s life. Most of his books were promoted as expounding principles to achieve “success”.
List of quotes
| Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit. |
| Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy. |
| There is no such thing as Something for nothing. |
| If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self. |
| Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache, carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit. |
| Until you have formed the habit of looking for the good instead of the bad there is in others, you will be neither successful nor happy. |
| Cherish your visions and your dreams, as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements. |
| Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy. |
| Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities. |
| You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed. |
| When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. |
| What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. |
| Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure. |
| More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth. |
| Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel. |
| Money without brains is always dangerous. |
| Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday. |
| Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. |
| Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive. |
| Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success. |
| It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project. |
| It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed. |
| It is always your next move. |
| It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served. |
| If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge. |
| If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self. |
| Your big opportunity may be right where you are now. |
| Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession. |
| You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself. |
| Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true. |
| Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing. |
| Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle. |
| Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit. |
| If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. |
| Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win – essential to success. |
| Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited. |
| Fears are nothing more than a state of mind. |
| Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best. |
| The starting point of all achievement is desire. |
| No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him. |
| You give before you get. |
| No man is ever whipped until he quits in his own mind. |
| Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire. |
| One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life. |
| Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat. |
| No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure. |
| No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like. |
| First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. |
| Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together. |
| The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going. |
| Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes. |
| A goal is a dream with a deadline. |
| Action is the real measure of intelligence. |
| All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea. |
| All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth. |
| The battle is all over except the “shouting” when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be. |
| Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do. |
| The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself. |
| Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements. |
| Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action. |
| Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything. |
| Don’t wait. The time will never be just right. |
| Edison failed 10, 000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times. |
| Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought. |
| Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit. |
| Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought. |
| Think and grow rich. |
| Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent. |
| When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve. |
| When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. |
| We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted. |
| War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. |
| Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting. |
| Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it. |
| Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another. |
| You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for. |
| There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it. |
| There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge. |
| The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face. |
| The most interesting thing about a postage stamp is the persistence with which it sticks to its job. |
| The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does. |
| The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. |
| The ladder of success is never crowded at the top. |
| Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge. |
| Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. |