a challenging read, but in a good way

loved it but some of the language got confusing for me . awesome content, really a good book

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Inspiring words

There are so many assumptions we make in life, about ourselves, about money, about where we can go. There are so many great words and helpful phrases that helped me. For example “the sentences and phrases you need to explain your idea might not have been invented yet” (quote not verbatim). This is very helpful for inventors like myself who has been working on a new way of thinking for over 23 years. I need to keep at it. I’ll be listening to this book again.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

l have my life back

I highly recommend this book.
It will change your life if you follow his advice.
I know it has changed mine.
I am free from the flesh. I live in the spirit and I am happy.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Prentice Mulford's, "Thoughts Are Things"

This book has a really neat perspective from an author in the 1880s. He basically give his impressions of thoughts and what they produce. A self help Guru of his time his prospective is fresh but quite different from today's understanding of the power of your own thoughts. It is a little hard to follow and swallow at times but it still is a good listen and something to meditate on. It is a worthy book to me to read (listen To), well worth my time.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

Good Information for All BUT --

I have read this Book 1 time so far , i need to go back and do a second reading .
It has very good INFO for any one who is open minded and has a Little back round .

BUT I still think if the reader has slowed down a little it will be more enjoyable for me, because there is so much information being put out and as fast as he reads i found my self rewinding several times to catch exactly what he is saying ( the main point )

other then that i think u will find very useful information in this book that u can use in every day life , i Liked it very much it was well worth the credit..

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

3 people found this helpful

Finally A Comprehensive Teaching on Thought

The perfect teaching on the evolution and futuristic expansion of thoughts... Worth the investment!!!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Spiritual body in a physical, OBE, dimensions +++

The narration of these ideas was pleasant, positive and brisk.

This is a compilation of "wisdoms" on a variety of spiritual topics. Some other reviews focused on the power of positive thinking, the effects of negative thoughts, thus I bought this audio book to learn more about thoughts, the mind, and the effect of our thoughts.

This author's books came out about 100 years ago, so I wasn't expecting any coverage on the topics of Out-of-Body travel (or astral travel), on dimensions, the higher self, of the concept of the current body only being the latest in a long line of numerous physical experiences (not just human), on the power of the focused evolved mind to manifest physical items or even to temporarily manifest a physical body. It was a pleasant surprise to hear this author speak of these experiences.

These are topics that are also mentioned in contemporary books, especially as in the third of Robert Monroe's trilogy of books, The Ultimate Journey. Other contemporary authors that also mention similar ideas, definitions, wisdoms, or descriptions are Tom Campbell, William Buhlman, Robert Bruce, Marilynn Hughes, Jurgen Ziewe, Kurt Leland, and a multitude of others who are direct experiencers of out of body explorations.

To see different authors write of the same things they have experienced or have come to understand in the non-physical, seems to be a second, third, etc witness.

Prentice Mulford had these same experiences over 100 years ago, and as with the other authors mentioned above, came back to describe for other humans how the System works, why we are here, how to make this human experience, this lifetime, better and more worthwhile. He set down many bits of wisdom in order to help people. But, as he said in this audio book in a couple of places, these ideas and thoughts are best served to those who are interested, and for those who have no interest at this time, just let it go.

We are all in a journey, and sometimes people aren't ready for this type of information. Maybe next lifetime, or hundreds of lifetimes later, but since this is pretty useful information and would make things easier, I'd recommend this audio book for a spiritually minded person.

I didn't give the *story" 5 stars because there are portions of this book that seemed repetitive or non-applicable due to the old-fashioned notions of some of the bits of wisdom and that they are no longer relevant examples today. For example, most people wouldn't worry about the Milliner over trimming their hat. And some of the husband and wife examples don't reflect marriages of today.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Hard to listen too, but there was good information

Here are notes; I take a lot of notes. Your thoughts do matter, if you keep that in mind you will go further in live, in all areas.

Thoughts are Things

Thoughts that are constantly held in your mind, will express itself in your body.

The spiritual mind will know in time that your thought influences people for or against your interests, though their bodies are thousands of miles

To say a thing must be, is the very power that makes it.

The spiritual or more enlightened mind says: “If you would help to drive away sickness, turn your thought as much as you can on health, strength and vigour, and on strong, healthy, vigorous material things, such as moving clouds, fresh breezes, the cascade, the ocean surge; on woodland scenes and growing healthy trees; on birds full of life and motion; for in so doing you turn on yourself a real current or this healthy life‐giving thought, which is suggested and brought you by the thought of such vigorous, strong material objects.

When you entertain any idea and say to yourself in substance: “Well, such a thing may be, though I cannot now see it” you remove a great barrier to the carrying out and realization by yourself of the new and strange possibilities in store for you.

Hospitality is expected from relatives, when to expect hospitality is to make such entertainment the result of a demand. Presents are expected from relatives, when to expect a gift makes it rather extortion. Real gifts are always surprises. No one expects a surprise since expectation destroys surprise.

No real or lasting good comes of any gift bestowed on another unless the heart goes with it, and its bestowal is to the giver an act of unalloyed pleasure.

The most sincere desire to help that person, but you feel a keen sense of pleasure in giving such help, and then you throw upon that person a certain thought‐element which will never leave them

Genuine heartfelt love is literally life giving, and if received by the child is for it a source of cheer, health, strength, and activity.

If you allow your will constantly to be overborne by another; if you give up your own preferences and inclinations, and become only another’s echo; if you live just as others desire, you will lose more and more, for this existence, the power of self‐assertion.

No person is really reformed by another; in the sense such a term is sometimes used. Reform must come from within. It must be self‐sustaining. It must not depend wholly on another’s presence or influence. If it does, it is only a temporary reform. It will fail when the influence of the person on whom it depends is removed.

We need to be careful of what we think and talk. Because thought runs in currents as real as those of air and water. Of what we think and talk we attract to us a like current of thought. This acts on mind or body for good or ill. If thought was visible to the physical eye we should see its currents flowing to and from people.

When people come together and in any way talk out their ill‐will towards others they are drawing to themselves with ten‐fold power an injurious thought current. Because the more minds united on any purpose the more power do they attract to effect that purpose. The thought current so attracted by those chronic complainers, grumblers and scandal mongers, will injure their bodies. Because whatever thought is most held in mind is most materialized in the body. If we are always thinking and talking of people’s imperfections we are drawing to us ever of that thought current, and thereby incorporating into ourselves those very imperfections.

If but two people were to meet at regular intervals and talk of health, strength and vigour of body and mind, at the same time opening their minds to receive of the Supreme the best idea as to the ways and means for securing these blessings, they would attract to them a thought current of such idea.

If you dwell a great deal on your own faults you will by the same laws attract more and more of their thought current, and so increase those faults. It is enough that you recognize in yourself those faults. Don’t be always saying of yourself, “I am weak or cowardly or ill‐tempered or imprudent,” Draw to yourself rather the thought current of strength, courage, even temper, prudence and all other good qualities. Keep the image of these qualities in mind and you make them a part of yourself.

The surest way for a young woman to become ugly is to be discontented, peevish, cross, complaining and envious of others. Because in these states of mind she is drawing to her the invisible substance of thought, which acts on and injures her body. It ruins the complexion, makes lines and creases in the face, sharpens the nose and transforms the face of youth into that of the shrew in very quick time. I am not moralizing here or saying: “You ought not to do thus and so.” It is simply cause and result. Put your face in the fire, and it is scarred and disfigured, because of an element acting on it. Put your mind in the fire of ill‐will, envy or jealousy, and it is also scarred, seamed and disfigured, because of an element as real as fire, though invisible, acting on it.

You lose gradually all fear as it is proven more and more to you that when you are in the thought current of Infinite good there is nothing to fear. You realize more and more clearly that there is a great power and force which cares for you. You are wonderstruck at the fact that when your mind is set in the right direction all material things come to you with very little physical or external effort.

There is no limit to the power of the thought current you can attract to you nor limit to the things that can he done through the individual by it. In the future some people will draw so much of the higher quality of thought to them, that by it they will accomplish what some would call miracles. In this capacity of the human mind for drawing a thought current ever increasing in fineness of quality and power lies the secret of what has been called “magic.”

The quality of mind or emotion underlying all this hurried mental condition and consequent hurried act, is fear. Fear is but another name for lack of power to control our minds, or, in other words, to control the kind of thought we think or put out.

The cultivation of courage commences in the cultivation of deliberation in so called little acts like these. Deliberation and courage are as closely allied as fear and hurry. If we do not learn to govern our force properly in the doing of the smallest act we shall find such government far less easy in the doing of all acts.

If we analyze what we fear, we shall find we are in mind trying to deal with too much at once of the thing feared. There is only a relatively small amount to be dealt with now. In any transaction – in the doing of anything there is but one step to be taken at a time. We need to place what force is necessary, and no more on that one step. When that is taken we can take the next. The more we train our minds so to concentrate on the one step, the more do we increase capacity for sending our force all in one given direction at once.

Awkwardness, lack of address, lack of tact are all due to this lack of command of mind caused by lack of deliberation, or in other words, a trained incapacity for taking time to think or plan the proper thing to do. The terror‐stricken person if the ship seems in sudden danger runs up and down the deck to no purpose, and this physical action is an exact correspondence of the life long condition of his mind whose thought has been ever so darting from one thing to another, just as the whim seized him. The more deliberate person whose mind is trained to take time to think and hold or concentrate its thought, holds himself steady, and so gives himself time to see what may be the opportunities for escape. And these two persons would pick up a pin in a very different manner and with very different mental action and method.

For instance, you say to the woman who goes out to wash by the day and has never done anything else. “Mrs. A., why don’t you start a laundry? You can make a great deal more money in so doing.” “I start a laundry! Where in the world is the money coming from to start a laundry?” is her reply. Here the woman instead of entertaining your idea gives way immediately to fright concerning what seems to her the immense sum required, and following the same unreasoning, headlong, panicky style of thought, sets up in a moment an opposition to your proposition. She dare think only of working for day’s wages as she is called upon by those who hire her. And thousands for this reason dare not think, or find it disagreeable for them to think, of getting into some broader, more responsible and more profitable sphere of business, because they bunch at once all its possible difficulties into a mass, and out of mere habit will look only at that awful and imaginary bunch. But Mrs. C., the more deliberate washerwoman, hears your proposition and entertains it. In time she says to herself, “Why should I not start a laundry? Other people have and have succeeded.” She lives in the idea, talks to one and another about it, and finds out how they started. The longer she keeps in this current of thought the more plainly does she see the ways and means by which other people have “set up for themselves.” Finally, the idea so grows upon her, that she takes some step toward that end, and then another and another, and so by degrees drifts into the business.

Note: a good point to remember, keep your mind on one thing at a time and think on a idea before you just toss it away, because of fear.

You will remember that anything which is done in mind, expends quite as much force as if done with the body, so that the persons who linger abed in the morning and think with dread of the breakfasts to be cooked, or the rooms to be swept, so far as expenditure of force is concerned, will be doing those acts then and there while lying on their backs.

Cultivate deliberate act and movement in all things, and you lay more and more the solid foundation for courage, either moral or physical. But deliberate act does not always imply slowness. Just as thought moves with electric rapidity, so may it move the body when occasion requires, but the thought must be clearly planned, seen and outlined in mind before it is allowed to act on the body.

If the corners of a mouth are turned down, it is because most of the time the thoughts which govern and shape that mouth are gloomy and despondent. If a face does not invite people, and make them desire to get acquainted with its wearer, it is because that face is a sign advertising thoughts behind it which the wearer may not dare to speak to others, possibly may not dare to whisper to himself.

Persistency in thinking health, in imagining or idealizing yourself as healthy, vigorous, and symmetrical, is the cornerstone of health and beauty. Of that which you think most, that you will be, and that you will have most of. You say “No.” But your bed‐ridden patient is not thinking, “I am strong;” he or she is thinking, “I am so weak.”

Here is the cornerstone of all successful effort in this existence or any other. Never in thought acknowledge an impossibility. Never in mind reject what to you may seem the wildest idea with scorn; because, in so doing, you may not know what you are closing the door against. To say anything is impossible because it seems impossible to you, is just so much training in the dangerous habit of calling out “Impossible!” to every new idea. Your mind is then a prison full of doors, barred to all outside, and you the only inmate. “All things” are possible with God. God works in and through you. To say “Impossible!” as to what you may do or become is a sin. It is denying God’s power to work through you. It is denying the power of the Infinite Spirit to do through you far more than what you are now capable of conceiving in mind.

“God working in us and through us.”
If you demand persistently the truth and only the truth you will get it, and the whole truth means power to accomplish seeming impossibilities. “Thy faith hath made thee whole” said the Christ of Judea to a man who was healed. To us this passage interprets itself as meaning that the person healed had an innate power of believing that he could be healed. This power which was of his own spirit (and not of Christ’s) so acted on his body as instantly to cure his infirmities. Christ was a means of awakening this power in that man’s spirit.

The path of self-healing lies in the calling for the elements of health and strength, to drive out disease. That is you pray for such elements and they come to you. Strength or vigor is an element of spirit or more refined matter. The more often is your will exercised in praying for it, the quicker will it come. This is the secret for the perpetual maintenance and increase of vigor or any other desired quality.

As you are ruled more and more by the attraction of aspiration, the desire to be more and more of a God or Goddess, the determination to conquer all the evil within you, which is the only way to conquer any and all evil outside of you, your form will in accordance grow more upright, your eye will be more open and uplifted, your heart will be “lifted up,” your cheeks will bloom with fresher color, your blood will fill more and more with a finer and powerful element, giving to your limbs strength, vigor, suppleness and elasticity of movement. You are then filling more and more with the Elixir of Life, which is no myth but a spiritual reality and possibility.

But the motive must be the natural heart-felt zealous wish to impart what you receive to others. You cannot call the fullness of this power to you if you intend living only for self. You may get it to a degree and accomplish much by it. Your demand if living only for self may bring to you houses, wealth and fame. But the demand based on the selfish motive will in the end bring only pain, disease and disappointment.

Whatever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the continual thought or imagining must at last take form and shape in the world of seen and tangible things. I repeat this assertion often in these books and in various forms of expression because this fact is the cornerstone of your happiness or misery, permanent health and prosperity, or poverty. It needs to be kept as much as possible in mind. Our thought is the unseen magnet, ever attracting its correspondence in things seen and tangible. As we realize this more and more clearly, we shall become more and more careful to keep our minds set in the right direction. We shall be more and more careful to think happiness and success instead of misery and failure. It is very wonderful that the happiness or misery of our lives should be based on what seems so simple a law and method. But so-called “simple” things in Nature on investigation generally turn out incomprehensible and ever deepening mysteries. What most concerns us is to know a cause or agency that will produce a given result. When we realize that we can and do think ourselves into what we are, as regards health, wealth and position, we realize also that we have found in ourselves “the pearl of great price,” and we hasten to tell our neighbor that he may seek and find in himself this pearl and power also

Cultivation of the power of the spirit over the body that can prevent these ills. That power we first begin to cultivate and increase when we come to recognize and believe that mind or spirit is the power governing our bodies, and that whatever mind persistently images, thinks or imagines it makes.

Thanks Ralph

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

55 people found this helpful

Great!

Very important to be aware of these forces, our thoughts.
We all need to hear this over and over.
This book expanded my awareness.
I already knew thoughts are things, but now I really get it.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

This is a GREAT book!!!

Where does Thoughts Are Things rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Think of books like The Secret, The Success Principles, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind as books written for the beginner level. Then Think and Grow Rich, Harmonic Wealth and books like Million Dollar Mindset as for the intermediate.And this book; Thoughts are Things is for the advanced level, right on par with books by James Allen; As a Man Thinketh & From Poverty to Power. You need to have the fundamental understanding from other books before you can really grasp what the words in this book, or you may find it hard to believe.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Thoughts Are Things?

How profoundly it connects to spirituality

Which scene was your favorite?

I loved the whole book!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

14 people found this helpful