Echoes

The destiny of man is in his own soul.

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

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.

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

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

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

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

Do not let anyone else run your business.

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

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.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

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.

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

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.

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

To find yourself, think for yourself.

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

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.

To make ourselves, to shape a form from various elements — that is the task! The task of a sculptor! Of a productive human being!

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.