Echoes

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

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.

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

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

Thou oughtest in every deed and thought so to order thyself, as if thou wert to die this day.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers / Which of themselves our minds impress; / That we can feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness.

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

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

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

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.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.

O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Happy is the man who hath the hour of his death always before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die.

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.