Choice! The key is choice. You have options. You need not spend your life wallowing in
failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame, and self-pity. There is a better way to live!
– Og Mandino
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they
were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact,
all the care and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of
any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
– Og Mandino
You will achieve your grand dream, a day at a time, so set goals for each day – not long and
difficult projects, but chores that will take you, step by step, toward your rainbow.
– Og Mandino
Weak is he who permits his thoughts to control his actions; strong is he who forces his
actions to control his thoughts.
– Og Mandino
Championships, in games and in life, are won by those who have learned to cope with
adversity.
– Og Mandino
The best thing we can do for our children is to consciously work at being role models for
them. Teach them by your example, and they’ll remember and even try to imitate. Talk to
them one way and then act contrary to your words, and you’ve lost a kid.
– Og Mandino
Our worth is always determined by our deeds, not by our good intentions, however noble.
– Og Mandino
The greatest lesson that I have learned in my sixty-plus years of suffering and joy is that life
is a game. It’s spiritual, mysterious, and precious, but it’s still a game – and you can’t play in
that game with any chance at all of winning unless you know the rules!
– Og Mandino
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me
the stars.
– Og Mandino
How’s this for a sorry statistic? … Over five million prescriptions for Valium are dispensed in
this country every month, and we are now treating more than four thousand new cases of
mental illness every twenty-four hours… There must be a better way to live.
– Og Mandino
One of the most important and ageless secrets of life that I had to learn, with pain and tears,
is that you cannot even begin to turn a hopelessly bruised and defeated existence around or
jump off that dreary treadmill so far as your job and career are concerned or move off that
financial dead end that seems to have doomed you to failure and low self-esteem until you
appreciate the assets you already possess.
– Og Mandino
It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to check up
once in a while and make sure you haven’t lost the things money can’t buy.
– Og Mandino
Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and
contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in
getting, but only in giving.
– Og Mandino
Laugh at the world. Most important, laugh at yourself. If laughter could be dispensed at your
favorite drugstore, your family doctor would have you taking some every day. It’s a much
better way to live.
– Og Mandino
If the ingredients for happiness are not within a person, no material success or entertainment
or platinum credit cards can make that person smile.
– Og Mandino
To be always intending to make a new and better life but never to find time to set about it is
as to put off eating and drinking and sleeping from one day to the next until you’re dead.
– Og Mandino
Only a habit can subdue another habit.
– Og Mandino
It takes just as much energy to fail, you know, as it does to succeed, and that’s why we
have so many active, busy people who cannot understand why nothing is happening in their
lives.
– Og Mandino
The greatest secret in the world is that you only have to be a small measurable amount better
than mediocrity – and you’ve got it made.
– Og Mandino
Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well.
– Og Mandino
How sad that most of us know more about how and why our automobile functions than we
know about ourselves.
– Og Mandino
Whenever you make a mistake or get knocked down by life, don’t look back at it too long.
Mistakes are life’s way of teaching you. Your capacity for occasional blunders is inseparable
from your capacity to reach your goals. No one wins them all, and your failures, when they
happen, are just part of your growth. Shake off your blunders. How will you know your limits
without an occasional failure? Never quit. Your turn will come.
– Og Mandino
The only certain means of success is to render more and better service than is expected of
you, no matter what your task may be.
– Og Mandino
Build this day on a foundation of pleasant thoughts. Never fret at any imperfections that you
fear may impede your progress. Remind yourself, as often as necessary, that you are a
creature of God and have the power to achieve any dream by lifting up your thoughts.
– Og Mandino
Never allow anyone to rain on your parade and thus cast a pall of gloom and defeat on the
entire day. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to
set up in the fault-finding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you
permit it.
– Og Mandino
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
– Og Mandino
Search for the seed of good in every adversity. Master that principle and you will own a
precious shield that will guard you well through all the darkest valleys you must traverse.
– Og Mandino
First, recognize that you are not a sheep who will be satisfied with only a few nibbles of dry
grass or with following the herd as they wander aimlessly, bleating and whining, all of their
days. Separate yourself now from the multitude of humanity so that you will be able to
control your own destiny. Remember that what others think and say and do need never
influence what you think and say and do.
– Og Mandino
Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you
have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as
work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration.
– Og Mandino
Defeat. What is it? Nothing but a little education, nothing but the first step to something
better. The only people who never fail are those who never, never try.
– Og Mandino
A smile remains the most inexpensiv gift I can bestow on anyone and yet its powers can
vanquish kingdoms.
– Og Mandino
We have forgotten one of the basic facts of life: When we were given dominion over this
world, we were also given dominion over ourselves. We each plot our own map. God is not our
navigator. It was never His intention to chart a course for each of us and thus place us all
under His bondage. Instead, He bestowed on each each of us intellect and talent and vision
to map our own way, to write our own Book of Life in any manner that we choose.
– Og Mandino
How do I change?
If I feel depressed I will sing.
If I feel sad I will laugh.
If I feel ill I will double my labor.
If I feel fear I will plunge ahead.
If I feel inferior I will wear new garments.
If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice.
If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come.
If I feel incompetent I will think of past success.
If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals.
Today I will be the master of my emotions.
– Og Mandino
When it comes to improving the career side of your life, the greatest secret of success was
delivered to us from a mountaintop, nearly two thousand years ago, when Jesus told us that
if we were compelled to go a mile with someone, we should always go two. The extra mile.
– Og Mandino
No matter what you choose to call it, positive thoughts produce, negative thoughts hamper
and destroy.
– Og Mandino
Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find “tomorrow” on the
calendars of fools.
– Og Mandino
Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter, and perhaps is the only creature
that deserves to be laughed at. The finest of all laughter, however, is that of the person who
has enough self-confidence to laugh at himself. This shows the rare ability to look at oneself
objectively, and if you can do that, all your worries will shrink in size.
– Og Mandino
Treasure the friendship you receive above all. It will survive long after your gold and good
health have vanished.
– Og Mandino
Any goal that forces you to labor, day after day and year after year, so long and hard that
you never have any time for yourself and those you love is not a goal but a sentence… a
sentence to a lifetime of misery, no matter how much wealth and success you attain.
– Og Mandino
Today will never happen again. Don’t waste it with a false start or no start at all.
– Og Mandino
Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory
comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.
– Og Mandino
Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to
improve your performance the next time.
– Og Mandino
I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a might oak. The first blow
may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be
trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So
it will be with my efforts of today.
– Og Mandino
Success and procrastination are absolutely incompatible.
– Og Mandino
A cyprus tree touched with the genius of man becomes a shrine.
– Og Mandino
Five hundred years from now people will be writing about you. What they don’t know they will
invent. Why not give them authentic material?
– Og Mandino
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
– Og Mandino
The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving
them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day
convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to achieving
your dreams.
– Og Mandino
Today, and every day, deliver more than you are getting paid to do.
– Og Mandino
He who worries about calamities suffers them twice over.
– Og Mandino
Welcome every morning with a smile. Look on the new day as another special gift from your
Creator, another golden opportunity to complete what you were unable to finish yesterday.
Be a self-starter. Let your first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is
certain to echo through your entire day.
– Og Mandino
Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success,
every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some
tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and
fulfillment.
– Og Mandino
If you want to succeed, you must learn to live with failure. We learn wisdom from failure
much more than from success. Show me the person who has never stumbled, never messed
up a job, never made a mistake, and I’ll show you a person with a very dim future.
– Og Mandino
Detractors are everywhere. Remember that envy, like the worm, is always attracted to the
fairest apple!
– Og Mandino
Count your blessings. Once you realize how valuable you are and how much you have going
for you, the smiles will return, the sun will break out, the music will play, and you will finally
be able to move forward the life that God intended for you with grace, strength, courage,
and confidence.
– Og Mandino
In all my writing and speech-making throughout the years, I am forever reminding my
audiences that, like the laws of nature, gravity, and physics, the true principles of success
have been with us for thousands of years. They have never changed! And these old
principles will always work for you – or against you – no matter how you are trying to live
your life.
– Og Mandino
All the gold in the world cannot buy a dying man one more breath – so what does that make
today worth?
– Og Mandino
Sooner or later all mankind will realize that the greatest cure for all the ills and wrongs, the
cares, the sorrow and crimes of humanity rests solely in acts of love. Love is the greatest gift
from God. It is the divine spark that everywhere produces and restores life.
– Og Mandino
Even if you have failed at all else in the eyes of the world, if you have a loving family, you are
a success.
– Og Mandino
Never neglect the little things. Never skimp on that extra effort, that additional few minutes,
that soft word of praise or thanks, that delivery of the very best that you can do. It does not
matter what others think, it is of prime importance, however, what you think about you.
– Og Mandino
The secret of success is to triple your rate of failure.
– Og Mandino
None of us have learned very much until we train ourselves to treat every day as a separate life.
– Og Mandino
Can sand flow upward in the hourglass? No. Yesterday is buried forever and I will think of it no
more.
– Og Mandino
Help your kids grow and flourish in a garden of their own choice, not yours. When that
happens, both you and they have succeeded.
– Og Mandino
Nothing in life worth achieving is easy.
– Og Mandino