Echoes

I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning.

I know that I know nothing.

Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses...And now, as all the world is in error, I, though I know the true path,—how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better, then, to desist and strive no more. But if I strive not, who will?

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half-awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

There is no man in the world free from trouble or anguish, though he were King or Pope.

We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.

Man knows much more than he understands.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Do not let anyone else run your business.

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

To be or not to be, that is the question.