Success Quote by James Allen

Intensity gets miscast as restlessness: the kind of person who can’t sit still, always chasing the next stimulus. James Allen flips that assumption and turns “intense” into a spiritual advantage. In his hands, a strong nature isn’t the enemy of meditation; it’s the fuel. The line makes a quiet, persuasive bet about human psychology: the deeper your drives, appetites, and ambitions, the more you’ll crave an inner discipline capable of matching them.

Allen wrote at the turn of the 20th century, when “mind power,” self-help moralism, and quasi-mystical self-mastery were circulating alongside industrial acceleration and modern anxieties. His broader project (think As a Man Thinketh) treats the mind as both the origin of suffering and the lever for personal reform. So “meditation” here isn’t just calm breathing; it’s a regimen of attention and character, closer to ethical training than to escapist tranquility.

The subtext is almost corrective, even admonishing: if you’re intense and still scattered, that isn’t fate, it’s untrained power. He implies that the people most likely to succeed at meditation aren’t the naturally placid but the naturally forceful, because they have something at stake. “Readily” suggests a built-in recognition, a moment when intensity discovers its own limits and goes looking for a steadier center. “Successfully” carries Allen’s moral confidence that interior work produces outward results: discipline of thought becomes discipline of life. The quote works because it reframes meditation as an adult ambition, not a retreat from wanting, but a way to hold wanting without being owned by it.