Napoleon Hill

Cutting the telegraph line over which a call for the fire department is being sent does not put out the fire; nor does it remove the cause to deaden, with the aid of a dose of aspirin, the nerve line over which a headache is registering a call for help.

You cannot be a person of action if you permit yourself to go without proper physical attention until autointoxication takes your brain and kneads it into an inoperative mass that resembles a ball of putty.

Neither can you be a person of action if you eat the usual devitalized concoction called "white bread" (which has had all the real food value removed from it) and twice as much meat as your system can digest and properly dispose of.

You cannot be a person of action if you run to the pill bottle every time you have, or imagine you have, an ache or a pain, or swallow an aspirin tablet every time your intestines call on your brain for a douche bag of water and a spoonful of salt for cleansing purposes.

You cannot be a person of action if you overeat and under-exercise. You cannot be a person of action if you read the patent medicine booklets and begin to imagine yourself ailing with the symptoms described by the clever advertisement writer who has reached your pocket book through the power of suggestion. I have not touched a drug for more than five years, and I have not been either sick or ailing during that time, in spite of the fact that I perform more work each day than most men of my profession.

I have enthusiasm, endurance and action because I eat the sort of simple food that contains the bodybuilding elements that I require, and look after the eliminative processes as carefully as I bathe my body. If these simple and frank admissions appeal to you as being based upon common sense, take them and put them to the test, and if they serve you as well as they are serving me, both of us will have profited by the courage I had to summon to list them as a part of this lesson.

Usually, when anyone except a physician offers suggestions on the care of the body, he is immediately catalogued as a long-haired crank, and I will admit that the analysis is often correct.