When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood.

His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was nothing weird about it at all.

Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one.

Two things cannot be in one place.
"Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow." While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking.

He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones.