Echoes

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

What does your conscience say? — You should become who you are.

Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write.

It is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style — all mannerisms, tricks, adornments.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

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

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

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Become what you are.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

I would prefer inarticulate wisdom to loquacious foolishness.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.