Echoes

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for man to go.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live – I have no use for the sour-faced man – and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Optimism is true moral courage.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; ’Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

Attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do. Hold to your true aspirations no matter what is going on around you.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement and success have no meaning.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.