Echoes

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

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

What labels me, negates me.

I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me! “I shall die,” you say; you mean to say “I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death.”

He who is brave is free.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

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

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.

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

Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

The destiny of man is in his own soul.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune — I myself am good fortune.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

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

Let him that would move the world first move himself.