Success Quote by Norman Vincent Peale

Peale is selling a kind of spiritual leverage: the idea that reality is less decisive than the posture you take toward it. The phrasing is bluntly transactional - "success or failure" - which tells you his target isn’t contemplatives, it’s strivers. He’s preaching, but with the vocabulary of midcentury self-help and American ambition, where the inner life is valuable largely because it produces outward results.

The line "Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it" performs a neat rhetorical demotion. Facts are reduced to raw material; attitude becomes the real engine. That inversion is the whole pitch of positive thinking: it relocates power from circumstance to the self. It’s comforting, yes, but also disciplining. If your outlook "determines" the outcome, then despair isn’t just a feeling - it’s a personal error. The subtext is moral: you’re responsible not only for what you do, but for what you permit yourself to believe.

"You are overcome by the fact because you think you are" adds a psychological trapdoor. It frames defeat as self-fulfilling, something you consent to in advance. That’s a motivating idea in a sermon because it turns passivity into a choice, and choice into a form of faith. Context matters: Peale’s optimism rose with postwar American prosperity and anxieties about conformity and performance. His message fits a culture trying to feel in control, even when the world (and its "facts") is not particularly interested in being controlled.