Collier was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 19, 1885. He was the nephew of Peter Fenelon Collier, founder of Collier’s Weekly. He was involved in writing, editing, and research for most of his life. His book, The Secret of the Ages, sold over 300,000 copies during his life. Collier wrote about the practical psychology of abundance, desire, faith, visualization, confident action, and becoming your best.

Robert Collier Publications, Inc., still exists through the efforts of his widow and now his children and grandchildren and now even his great grandchildren. Collier’s Books have recently been brought back to prominence from being referenced in the popular metaphysical movie The Secret. Moreover, Robert Collier’s books have been popular with self help and New thought.

1. If you don’t make things happen then things will happen to you.

2. If you procrastinate when faced with a big difficult problem… break the problem into parts, and handle one part at a time.

3. If you see yourself as prosperous, you will be. If you see yourself as continually hard up, that is exactly what you will be.

4. In every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time.

5. Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.

6. Playing safe is probably the most unsafe thing in the world. You cannot stand still. You must go forward.

1. Ambition is not what man does… but what man would do.

2. But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.

3. How good is man’s life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

4. I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.

5. My sun sets to rise again.

6. Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

7. White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life’s business being just the terrible choice.

1. The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

2. Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough, and it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

3. Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.

4. I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

5. More men die of worry than of work, because more men worry than work.

6. In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

7. The only way round is through.

8. By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

9. The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working when you get up in the morning, and doesn’t stop until you get to the office.

10. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

11. Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found out it was ourselves.

12. A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

13. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

14. Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.

15. A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

16. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

17. A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

18. Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

19. It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

20. My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

21. The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

22. There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

23. The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.

24. We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Born at Lichfield in England, and educated at a school in Bloomsbury, he entered the British Museum in 1851 as an assistant librarian. In 1875, he became superintendent of the Reading Room, in 1881, editor of the General Catalogue of Printed Books, and in 1890 until his retirement in 1899, Keeper of Printed Books.

His literary works include numerous translations from the Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; several books of verse; the book of short stories The Twilight of the Gods (1888, 16 stories; 12 stories added in the 1903 edition); biographies of Thomas Carlyle, John Milton, William Blake, and others; The Age Of Dryden (1895); a History of Italian Literature; English Literature: An Illustrated Record (with Edmund Gosse); and many articles for encyclopedias and the Dictionary of National Biography. He also discovered and edited some unpublished poems of Shelley (Relics of Shelley, 1862). His poem “Where Corals Lie” was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar as part of Sea Pictures and was first performed in 1899.

The deeps have music soft and low
When winds awake the airy spry,
It lures me, lures me on to go
And see the land where corals lie.

By mount and steed, by lawn and rill,
When night is deep, and moon is high,
That music seeks and finds me still,
And tells me where the corals lie.

Yes, press my eyelids close, ’tis well,
But far the rapid fancies fly
The rolling worlds of wave and shell,
And all the lands where corals lie.

Heinlein was a notable writer of science-fiction short stories, and he was one of a group of writers who were groomed in their writing by John W. Campbell, Jr. the editor of Astounding magazine – notwithstanding that Heinlein himself had denied Campbell having influenced his writing in any great degree.

Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly integrated recognizable social themes: The importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress non-conformist thought. He also examined the relationship between physical and emotional love, explored various unorthodox family structures, and speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices. His iconoclastic approach to these themes led to wildly divergent perceptions of his works and attempts to place mutually contradictory labels on his work. For example, his 1959 novel Starship Troopers was regarded by some as advocating militarism and to some extent fascism, although many passages in the book disparage the inflexibility and stupidity of a purely militaristic mindset. By contrast, his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land put him in the unexpected role of a pied piper of the sexual revolution, and of the counterculture, and through this book he was credited with popularizing the notion of polyamory.

1. A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

2. Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

3. Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.

4. Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

5. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

6. I never learned from a man who agreed with me.

7. No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

8. One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.

9. The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

10. Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

11. A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

12. Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.

13. Do not confuse “duty” with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.