Life & Wisdom Quote by Orison Swett Marden

Obstacles don’t just block you, Marden argues; they perform. They posture like “wild animals,” living off the energy of your hesitation. That metaphor is doing heavy motivational labor: it converts the vague, modern feeling of being stuck into a scene your nervous system recognizes instantly. Predator and prey. Stare down the threat, reclaim the terrain.

The intent is practical and evangelical in the late-19th-century self-help sense: courage is not a noble abstraction but a technique. Notice how he rigs the encounter. Obstacles are “cowards,” meaning they aren’t inherently powerful; their power is rented from your fear. Yet they will “bluff,” a word borrowed from poker and street psychology, implying that most barriers are partly theater, partly social intimidation, partly your own projection. That’s subtext with teeth: the biggest fight is not against the world but against the mind’s talent for enlarging danger.

Context matters. Marden wrote in an America intoxicated with self-making, when industrial capitalism was turning lives into competitions for security and status. His animal imagery takes impersonal systems and re-describes them as something an individual can confront. It’s an empowering move, and also a sleight of hand: structural obstacles become personal trials, solvable by attitude and grit.

Still, the line works because it captures a real psychological mechanism. Anxiety thrives on avoidance. “Look them squarely in the eye” isn’t bravado; it’s exposure therapy in a Victorian suit, insisting that clarity and action shrink what dread inflates.