Wallace D. Wattles

Get rid of the idea that God wants you to sacrifice yourself for others, and that you can
secure his favor by doing so; God requires nothing of the kind. What he wants is that you
should make the most of yourself, for yourself, and for others; and you can help others more
by making the most of yourself than in any other way.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Do not spend any time in day dreaming or castle building; hold to the one vision of what you
want, and act now.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The normal desire for increased wealth is not an evil or a reprehensible thing; it is simply the
desire for more abundant life; it is aspiration.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The desire to rule for selfish gratification has been the curse of the world.
– Wallace D. Wattles

To think health when surrounded by the appearances of disease, or to think riches when in
the midst of appearances of poverty, requires power; but he who acquires this power
becomes a master mind. He can conquer fate; he can have what he wants.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Getting rich is not the result of saving, or “thrift”; many very penurious people are poor, while
free spenders often get rich.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The purpose of Nature is the advancement and unfoldment of life; and every man should
have all that can contribute to the power, elegance, beauty, and richness of life; to be
content with less is sinful.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The grateful mind is constantly fixed upon the best; therefore it tends to become the best; it
takes the form or character of the best, and will receive the best.
– Wallace D. Wattles

If you want to become rich, you must not make a study of poverty. Things are not brought
into being by thinking about their opposites. Health is never to be attained by studying
disease and thinking about disease; righteousness is not to be promoted by studying sin and
thinking about sin; and no one ever got rich by studying poverty and thinking about poverty.
Medicine as a science of disease has increased disease; religion as a science of sin has
promoted sin, and economics as a study of poverty will fill the world with wretchedness and
want.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The poor do not need charity; they need inspiration. Charity only sends them a loaf of bread
to keep them alive in their wretchedness, or gives them an entertainment to make them forget
for an hour or two; but inspiration will cause them to rise out of their misery. If you want to
help the poor, demonstrate to them that they can become rich; prove it by getting rich
yourself.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Every day is either a successful day or a day of failure; and it is the successful days which
get you what you want. If every day is a failure, you can never get rich; while if every day is
a success, you cannot fail to get rich.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Wherever you find a boastful person, you find one who is secretly doubtful and afraid.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Success, growth and development are only attained by the right use of time; and we are
failures today in exact proportion as we have erred in our use of time past.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The object of all life is development; and everything that lives has inalienable right to all the
development it is capable of attaining.
– Wallace D. Wattles

A man’s highest happiness is found in the bestowal of benefits on those he loves; love finds its
most natural and spontaneous expression in giving. The man who has nothing to give cannot
fill his place as a husband or father, as a citizen, or as a man.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner, and not doing enough
things in an efficient manner.
– Wallace D. Wattles

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and
consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Do, every day, all that you can do that day, and do each act in an efficient manner.
– Wallace D. Wattles

An ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.
– Wallace D. Wattles

You are not showing hardness of heart or an unfeeling disposition when you refuse to pity
poverty, see poverty, read about poverty, or think or talk about it, or to listen to those who
do talk about it. Use your will power to keep your mind off the subject of poverty, and to
keep it fixed with faith and purpose on the vision of what you want.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Since the desire for more life is inherent in all things, when a man begins to move toward
larger life more things attach themselves to him, and the influence of his desire is multiplied.
– Wallace D. Wattles

You will get rich most easily in point of effort, if you do that for which you are best fitted; but
you will get rich most satisfactorily if you do that which you want to do.
– Wallace D. Wattles

There is nothing wrong in wanting to get rich. The desire for riches is really the desire for a
richer, fuller and more abundant life; and that desire is praise worthy. The man who does not
desire to live more abundantly is abnormal, and so the man who does not desire to have
money enough to buy all he wants is abnormal.
– Wallace D. Wattles

By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it.
– Wallace D. Wattles

To permit your mind to dwell upon the inferior is to become inferior and to surround yourself
with inferior things. On the other hand, to fix your attention on the best is to surround
yourself with the best, and to become the best.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Education is measured, not by the number of books the individual has read, but by his
capacity for doing things.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Oral prayer is well enough, and has its effect, especially upon yourself, in clarifying your
vision and strengthening your faith; but it is not your oral petitions which get you what you
want. In order to get rich you do not need a “sweet hour of prayer”; you need to “pray
without ceasing.” And by prayer I mean holding steadily to your vision, with the purpose to
cause its creation into solid form, and the faith that you are doing so.
– Wallace D. Wattles

It is really not the number of things you do, but the efficiency of each separate action that
counts.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Man is a thinking center, and can originate thought. All the forms that man fashions with his
hands must first exist in his thought; he cannot shape a thing until he has thought that
thing. And so far man has confined his efforts wholly to the work of his hands; he has applied
manual labor to the world of forms, seeking to change or modify those already existing. He
has never thought of trying to cause the creation of new forms by impressing his thoughts
upon Formless Substance.
– Wallace D. Wattles

To learn how to make every thought and action constructive, is to master the secret of all
attainment.
– Wallace D. Wattles

A man’s way of doing things is the direct result of the way he thinks about things. To do
things in a way you want to do them, you will have to acquire the ability to think the way
you want to think; this is the first step toward getting rich.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Give every man more in use value than you take from him in cash value; then you are adding
to the life of the world by every business transaction.
– Wallace D. Wattles

Do not tell of your past troubles of a financial nature, if you have had them, do not think of
them at all. Do not tell of the poverty of your parents, or the hardships of your early life; to
do any of these things is to mentally class yourself with the poor for the time being, and it will
certainly check the movement of things in your direction.
– Wallace D. Wattles

You wil see that it is a self-evident proposition that if you do not do any inefficient acts, and
if you do a sufficient number of efficient acts, you will become rich. If, now, it is possible for
you to make each act an efficient one, you see again that the getting of riches is reduced to
an exact science, like mathematics.
– Wallace D. Wattles

The conceited person is one who holds himself to be better than others; the truly modest
person is one who exalts himself, while admitting that everybody else is as good, and as
great as he. That is the true way to love your neighbor as yourself; simply admit that he is
as good as you are. There is no other way that I know of.
– Wallace D. Wattles