The Power of Positive Thinking

by Norman Vincent Peale

‘fear is the most disintegrating enemy of human personality’, and a prominent physician declares that ‘worry is the most subtle and destructive of all human diseases’. Another physician tells us that thousands of people are ill because of ‘dammed-up anxiety’. These sufferers have been unable to expel their anxieties which have turned inward on the personality, causing many forms of ill-health. The destructive quality of worry is indicated by the fact that the word itself is derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘to choke’. If someone were to put his fingers around your throat and press hard, cutting off the flow of vital power, it would be a dramatic demonstration of what you do to yourself by long-held and habitual worry.