“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early life, when I saw the implausible, often the ‘impossible’ come true.“

– F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Crack-Up,
February, 1936

“Build up within your mind and soul good and noble thoughts. The Freudians tell us that evil thoughts come up out of the unconscious mind to torment us.

But if you put good and clean and noble thoughts into your conscious mind, by and by your unconscious mind will be saturated with those thoughts so that it will send up, not evil impulses, but good. In a deep sense you are what you think.

Before you do an act with your hand, you do it with your mind.

Think bad and you will do bad.

Think good and you will do good. The sinister fact is that if you do a thing often enough with your mind, you will do it with your hand.

The mental thief is very likely to become the actual thief. Emerson said, ‘The thought is ancestor to the deed.’“

– Norman Vincent Peale, “You Can Win,” 1938 edition