Who really said it

Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind

Q: Did Christian D. Larson say "Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind"?

Yes. Confirmed word-for-word in Larson's Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), where it is the first of twelve promises on a leaf headed "PROMISE YOURSELF," sitting between the Foreword and Chapter I — verified in the scanned Harvard copy. One wrinkle: Larson wrote a heading plus a list, so the popular single sentence is really his title and his first line run together — the words are all his, the punctuation is ours.

Written by Christian D. Larson 1874–1954 · American New Thought writer & lecturer

Verified Free to reuse

Confirmed word-for-word in Larson’s Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), where it is the first of twelve promises on a leaf headed “PROMISE YOURSELF,” sitting between the Foreword and Chapter I — verified in the scanned Harvard copy ↗. One wrinkle: Larson wrote a heading plus a list, so the popular single sentence is really his title and his first line run together — the words are all his, the punctuation is ours.

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind” Christian D. Larson, "Promise Yourself," in Your Forces and How to Use Them (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912).

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Evoking the world of Christian D. Larson — American New Thought writer & lecturer. Theme: "Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The page it comes from

Work: Your Forces and How to Use Them
Published: 1912 — Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York (the Library of Congress copy carries a New Literature Publishing Co., Los Angeles imprint of the same year)
Where in the book: An unnumbered leaf headed “PROMISE YOURSELF,” between the Foreword and Chapter I — the first of twelve promises
Later life: Adopted by Optimist International in 1922 as The Optimist Creed, using ten of Larson’s twelve lines

PROMISE YOURSELF

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticise others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear; and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words but in great deeds.
To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you. All twelve promises, as printed in 1912

Transcribed from the 1912 Harvard copy; the scan’s OCR is rough, so spelling here follows the printed page (including Larson’s British-style “criticise”). The last two promises are the ones Optimist International’s creed leaves out.

Scanned first edition — Harvard University copy

Turn to the “Promise Yourself” leaf

Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), full scan at the Internet Archive

How we verified this

1912 — Larson prints twelve promises under the heading “PROMISE YOURSELF” on a leaf facing the opening of Your Forces and How to Use Them. The first is “To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.” Read it in the Harvard copy ↗.
1922 — Optimist International adopts the piece as The Optimist Creed. By the organisation’s own account ↗, a Los Angeles member’s wife clipped it from a newspaper, her husband ran it in his club bulletin, and California clubs pushed it nationwide.
Today — the creed is recited from a poster ↗ that carries ten of the twelve lines and no author’s name, while the one-sentence version circulating online silently welds Larson’s heading onto his first promise.

Public domain

Your Forces and How to Use Them was published in 1912, well before the 1931 cutoff, so the book and the “Promise Yourself” text are in the public domain in the United States. Two library copies — Harvard’s and the Library of Congress’s ↗ — are both catalogued to 1912, and the Library of Congress records that it is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the work. Optimist International’s later branding of its own creed materials is a separate matter from Larson’s underlying text.

Fact-check

Nobody stole it — they just dropped the name

This is the rare inspirational blockbuster that is exactly what it claims to be. Larson really wrote it, and the sourcing is solid. What goes wrong is subtler: the line circulates as an institution’s property, in a shape Larson never printed, credited to no one at all.

“The Optimist Creed” / Optimist International de-attributed

Optimist International adopted the piece in 1922 and its history page credits Larson plainly ↗ — but the creed as actually handed out does not. The organisation’s official creed poster ↗ prints the text with no author credit anywhere on the sheet, which is how millions met the words: authorless, and belonging to a club rather than a man.

A heading quietly folded into the sentence re-punctuated

Larson wrote a title — PROMISE YOURSELF — followed by twelve promises each opening “To…”. The first reads “To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.” The familiar “Promise yourself to be so strong…” welds his heading onto his first line to make one sentence. Every word is Larson’s, as the 1912 scan shows ↗; only the punctuation is modern.

Ten lines standing in for twelve abridged

The creed in circulation stops at “too happy to permit the presence of trouble.” Larson kept going. His last two promises — “To think well of yourself…” and “To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side…” — are in the 1912 book but absent from the official poster ↗.

1910 vs 1912 minor drift

Some listings, including the bibliography on Larson’s Wikipedia page ↗, date the book to 1910, while that same page’s prose dates the poem to 1912. Two independent library copies — Harvard’s and the Library of Congress’s — are both catalogued 1912, which is also the year Optimist International gives. Either way the line is comfortably pre-1931.

The attribution is sound: Christian D. Larson wrote it, and you can read it on the page in the 1912 first edition ↗. He just never got the byline on the poster.

Context

The creed that outran its author

Larson opened Your Forces and How to Use Them not with an argument but with a promise — twelve of them, printed on their own leaf before Chapter I even begins. It reads less like the start of a book than like something meant to be torn out and pinned up. Which is more or less what happened.

In 1922 Optimist International adopted the piece as The Optimist Creed, and it has been recited in clubrooms ever since. That adoption is the reason the words survived — and also the reason most people who can quote the first line have never heard of Christian D. Larson.

The words won. The byline didn’t.

How a self-help preface became an institution’s creed

Optimist International’s own history credits the piece to Larson and dates it to 1912, and describes a distinctly analogue route to adoption: the wife of Los Angeles Optimist James V. Westervelt spotted the item in a newspaper and clipped it for her husband, who ran it in his club bulletin — after which California clubs pushed to make it official.

Two of Larson’s twelve lines did not make the cut. The creed as Optimist International prints it stops at “too happy to permit the presence of trouble,” leaving behind “To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words but in great deeds” and “To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you.” The second of those is, ironically, one of the most-shared lines of the lot.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Resilience Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912) — full scanarchive.org

The Harvard University copy, digitized by Google. The “PROMISE YOURSELF” leaf sits between the Foreword and Chapter I — this is the primary evidence.

Your forces and how to use them — Library of Congress copyarchive.org

A second independently catalogued 1912 copy (New Literature Publishing Co., Los Angeles, 329 pp.), corroborating the date.

History of Optimist Internationaloptimist.org

The adopting organisation’s own account: written by Christian Larson, published as “Promise Yourself” in 1912, adopted as the creed in 1922.

The Optimist Creed (official poster)optimist.org

The creed as it is actually distributed: ten lines, and no author credit anywhere on the sheet.

Christian D. Larsonen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the author (1874–1954), and the note that his 1912 poem became the creed Optimist International adopted in 1922.

Christian D. Larson — quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Sourced quotations organised under Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), corroborating the book’s date.

The author

The man whose most-quoted words lost his name

Christian D. Larson

1874–1954 · American New Thought writer & lecturer

Christian Daa Larson was an American New Thought leader, teacher and prolific author of metaphysical self-improvement books, active in the movement’s early-20th-century heyday. He believed people carry vast latent powers that the right mental attitude can unlock — the thesis of Your Forces and How to Use Them, the 1912 book that opens with the twelve promises. More than a century on, his books remain in print, and his best-known lines are recited worldwide by people who have never heard his name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Larson, Christian D. “Promise Yourself.” In Your Forces and How to Use Them. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912. Unnumbered leaf between the Foreword and Chapter I. Verified in the Harvard University copy digitized by Google for the Internet Archive.

MLA (9th ed.)

Larson, Christian D. “Promise Yourself.” Your Forces and How to Use Them, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912.

APA (7th ed.)

Larson, C. D. (1912). Promise yourself. In Your forces and how to use them. Thomas Y. Crowell Company.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/promise-yourself-to-be-so-strong-that-nothing-can-disturb