r discouragement. If there
is anything we ever feel grateful for, it is that we have had courage
and pluck enough to push on, to keep going when things looked dark and
when seemingly insurmountable obstacles confronted us.

Most people are their own worst enemies. We are all the time
"queering" our life game by our vicious, tearing-down thoughts and
unfortunate moods. Everything depends upon our courage, our faith in
ourselves, in our holding a hopeful, optimistic outlook; and yet,
whenever things go wrong with us, whenever we have a discouraging day
or an unfortunate experience, a loss or any misfortune, we let the
tearing-down thought, doubt, fear, despondency, like a bull in a china
shop, tear through our mentalities, perhaps breaking up and destroying
the work of years of building up, and we have to start all over again.
We work and live like the frog in the well; we climb up only to fall
back, and often lose all we gain.

One of the worst things that can ever happen to a person is to get it
into his head that he was born unlucky and that the Fates are against
him. There are no Fates, outside of our own mentality. We are our own
Fates. We control our own destiny.

There is no fate or destiny which puts one man down and another up.
"It is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." He
only is beaten who admits it. The man is inferior who admits that he
is inferior, who voluntarily takes an inferior position because he
thinks the best things were intended for somebody else.

You will find that just in proportion as you increase your confidence
in yourself by the affirmation of what you wish to be and to do, your
ability will increase.

No matter what other people may think about your ability, never allow
yourself to doubt that you can do or become what you long to. Increase
your self-confidence in every possible way, and you can do this to a
remarkable degree by the power of self-suggestion.

This form of suggestion--talking to oneself vigorously,
earnestly--seems to arouse the sleeping forces in the subconscious self
more effectually than thinking the same thing.

There is a force in words spoken aloud which is not stirred by going
over the same words mentally. They sometimes arouse slumbering
energies within us which thinking does not stir up--especially if we
have not been trained to think deeply, to focus the mind closely. They
make a more lasting impression upon the mind, just