Echoes

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Do not mistake yourself by believing that your being has something in it more exalted than that of others.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life.

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me never to delight in praise or to be distressed by reproach. Before my Soul taught me, I doubted the value of my accomplishments until the passing days sent someone who would extol or disparage them. But now I know that trees blossom in the spring and give their fruits in the summer without any desire for accolades. And they scatter their leaves abroad in the fall and denude themselves in the winter without fear of reproof.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.

Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique. Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.

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

Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be "damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.

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.

Though the whole world should praise him, he would not be stimulated to greater endeavour, and though the whole world should condemn him, he would not be depressed. So fixed was he in the difference between the internal judgement of himself and the external judgement of others.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

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