The Power of Positive Thinking

Echoes, per a summary

The summaries we read have Peale saying that thoughts shape a life and that new thoughts can remake a person. They show him crediting no one for it.

3rd to 1st c. BCE
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.”
Dhammapada. Earliest we can find, more than 1,900 years earlier.
1952
“Positive thoughts create around yourself an atmosphere propitious to the development of positive outcomes.”

Secondhand, from Quote Investigator. Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952).

This book is still in copyright, so we read an account of it, not the book.

Sources

Ideas we link to this book