Quotes by James Allen

As you cannot have a sweet and wholesome abode unless you admit the air and sunshine freely into your rooms, so a strong body and a bright, happy, or serene countenance can only result from the free admittance into the mind of thoughts of joy and goodwill and serenity.

Let your soul expand, let your heart reach out to others in loving and generous warmth, and great and lasting will be your joy, and all prosperity will come to you.

People seek guidance of him who is master of himself.

The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow.

The selfishness must be discovered and understood before it can be removed. It is powerless to remove itself, neither will it pass away of itself. Darkness ceases only when light is introduced; so ignorance can only be dispersed by Knowledge; selfishness by Love.

Man is manacled only by himself; thought and action are the jailers of Fate.

Sympathy is bliss; in it is revealed the highest, purest blessedness. It is divine, for in its reciprocal light all thought of self is lost, and there remains only the pure joy of oneness with others.

Revenge is a virus which eats into the very vitals of the mind and poisons the entire spiritual being.

The miser who clings to his money and will not give up any of it because of the pleasure which its possession affords him cannot have any of the material comforts of life. He lives in continual want and discomfort in spite of all his wealth.

Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results.

Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

Many give way when success is assured, and rapidly fall back into failure.

Without temptation the soul cannot grow.

Human life when rightly lived is simple ... but it is not rightly lived while it is bound to a complexity of lusts, desires, and wants -- these are not the real life but the burning fever and painful disease which originate in an unenlightened condition of mind.

The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.

He who has seen the light does not choose to walk in darkness.

If you would have your home and your surroundings happy, be happy. You can transform everything around you if you will transform yourself.

Joy comes and fills the self-emptied heart; it abides with the peaceful; its reign is with the pure.

The source and cause of all temptation is in the inward desire; that being purified or eliminated, outward objects and extraneous powers are utterly powerless to move the soul to sin or to temptation.

Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today.

Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: -- He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment is but his looking-glass.

Joy cannot remain with the selfish; it is wedded to Love.

The heart that sins must sorrow.

Joy flees from the selfish, it deserts the quarrelsome; it is hidden from the impure.

Only by much searching and mining, are gold and diamonds obtained, and man can find every truth connected with his being, if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul.

Possessions are mere transient effects that come when they are required, and after their purpose has been served, pass away.

If you are in need of any spiritual thing -- joy, assurance, peace, or whatelse soever -- you can only come into full possession of it by giving an equivalent; you must pay the price for it.

The curtailing of one's desires is the beginning of wisdom; their entire mastery its consumption.

Make pure thy heart, and thou wilt make thy life rich, sweet and beautiful.

The man who will not give up his passions, who clings to anger, unkindness, sensuality, pride, vanity self-indulgence, for the momentary pleasure which their gratification affords him is a spiritual miser; he cannot have any spiritual comforts.

A man's sympathy extends just so far as his wisdom reaches, and no further; and a man only grows wiser as he grows tenderer and more compassionate. To narrow one's sympathy is to narrow one's heart, and so to darken and embitter one's life.

Man is shut out from Heaven and Peace and Truth only in so far as he shuts out others from his sympathy. Where his sympathy ends his darkness and torment and turmoils begin.

Selfhood is the source of suffering; Truth is the source of bliss.

When a man is rescued from selfish desire his mind is unencumbered, and he is free to work for humanity.

The universe has no favourites; it is supremely just, and gives to every man his rightful earnings.

The man of desire needs the promise of reward to urge him to action. He is as a child working for the possession of a toy.

Only as men succeed in seeing no evil in others will they become free from sin, and sorrow, and suffering.

Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step.

As a man purifies his heart, temptation ceases, for when a certain unlawful desire has been taken out of the heart, the object which formerly appealed to it can no longer do so, but becomes dead and powerless, for there is nothing left in the heart that can respond to it.

Man is always the master, even in his weaker and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his household.

Calmness is power.

He who would be blest, let him scatter blessings.

A sweet and happy soul is the ripened fruit of experience and wisdom, and it sheds abroad the invisible yet powerful aroma of its influence, gladdening the hearts of others, and purifying the world.

A man's weakness and strength, purity and impurity, are his own, and not another man's; they are brought about by himself, and not by another; and they can only be altered by himself, never by another.

Thought and action are the jailers of Fate -- they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom -- they liberate being noble.

The human will, that force unseen, The offspring of a deathless soul, Can hew the way to any goal, Though walls of granite intervene.

Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.

Only himself manacles man.

Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry.

The man who thinks hateful thoughts brings hatred upon himself. The man who thinks loving thoughts is loved.

In a justly ordered
universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.

As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.

Nature gives all, without reservation, and loses nothing; man or woman, grasping all, loses everything.

The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony.

The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.

Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.

A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.

Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it.

A noble and God-like character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with God-like thoughts.

Thought is the fountain of action, life and manifestation; make the fountain pure, and all will be pure.

Suffering is always the effect of wrong thought in some direction. It is an indication that the individual is out of harmony with himself, with the Law of his being.

The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state...Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.

The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed.

As a man thinketh in his heart, so shall he be.

Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.

Think lovingly, speak lovingly, act lovingly, and every need shall be supplied.

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears.

A man remains ignorant because he loves ignorance, and chooses ignorant thoughts; a man becomes wise because he loves wisdom and chooses wise thoughts.

And I may stand where health, success, and power Await my coming, if, each fleeting hour I cling to love and patience; and abide With stainlessness; and never step aside From high integrity; so shall I see At last the land of immortality.

Every action and feeling is preceded by a thought.

He who would be useful, strong, and happy must cease to be a passive receptacle for the negative, beggarly, and impure streams of thought.

A teacher is a sower of seed, a spiritual agriculturist, while he who teaches himself is the wise farmer of his own mental plot.

Spiritual meditation is the pathway to Divinity. It is a mystic ladder which reaches from earth to heaven, from error to Truth, from pain to peace.

Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.

The vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart -- this you will build your life by, this you will become.

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it.

Thus meditating you will no longer strive to build yourself up in your prejudices, but, forgetting self, you will remember only that you are seeking the Truth.

The key to happiness is having dreams; the key to success is making them come true.

Man, as a spiritual being, cannot be maintained in strength, uprightness, and peace except if he periodically withdraw himself from the outer world of perishable things and reach inwardly towards the abiding and imperishable realities.

The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth.

There can be no progress, no achievement without sacrifice.

A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.

A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but a looking glass.

Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.

A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.

As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.