"Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements"
About this Quote
Napoleon Hill sells ambition the way a good ad man sells soap: take a messy human desire, give it a clean origin story, then promise a gleaming result if you just commit. “Children of your soul” is a soft-focus metaphor that sanctifies wanting. Dreams aren’t frivolous here; they’re offspring, obligations, proof you’re alive on the inside. Hill’s intent is motivational, but it’s also disciplinary: if your visions come from your “soul,” then abandoning them isn’t merely quitting, it’s a kind of betrayal.
The second half tightens the pitch. Calling dreams “blueprints” swaps mysticism for engineering. Blueprints imply structure, planning, and inevitability: the building already exists in potential, and achievement becomes less a gamble than a construction job. That’s classic Hill, whose whole project turns success into something like a reproducible technology. The subtext is seductive and slightly coercive: if you fail, the problem isn’t luck, class, timing, or institutions; it’s that you didn’t “cherish” the plan hard enough, didn’t protect your inner architecture from doubt.
Context matters. Hill’s career sits in the early-to-mid 20th century boom of American self-help and salesmanship, a period obsessed with upward mobility and anxious about who gets left behind. His language flatters the reader as both spiritual and entrepreneurial - a soul with a drafting table. It works because it fuses tenderness (“cherish”) with productivity (“ultimate achievements”), making aspiration feel like both self-care and duty. In Hill’s world, imagination is not escape; it’s the down payment on a future you’re responsible for building.
The second half tightens the pitch. Calling dreams “blueprints” swaps mysticism for engineering. Blueprints imply structure, planning, and inevitability: the building already exists in potential, and achievement becomes less a gamble than a construction job. That’s classic Hill, whose whole project turns success into something like a reproducible technology. The subtext is seductive and slightly coercive: if you fail, the problem isn’t luck, class, timing, or institutions; it’s that you didn’t “cherish” the plan hard enough, didn’t protect your inner architecture from doubt.
Context matters. Hill’s career sits in the early-to-mid 20th century boom of American self-help and salesmanship, a period obsessed with upward mobility and anxious about who gets left behind. His language flatters the reader as both spiritual and entrepreneurial - a soul with a drafting table. It works because it fuses tenderness (“cherish”) with productivity (“ultimate achievements”), making aspiration feel like both self-care and duty. In Hill’s world, imagination is not escape; it’s the down payment on a future you’re responsible for building.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Think and Grow Rich (1937) — Napoleon Hill; contains the passage: "Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements." |
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