As a Man Thinketh

James Allen was a British philosophical and inspirational writer whose books and essays helped shape the early modern literature of self-mastery, personal responsibility, and spiritual reflection. Born in Leicester, England, in 1864, Allen wrote with unusual economy and moral seriousness on thought, habit, character, serenity, discipline, and the relation between the inward life and outward circumstance. His best-known work, As a Man Thinketh, has endured because it states a central idea of personal-development literature in its simplest and most forceful form: that habitual thought shapes character, and character shapes life.