Echoes

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

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

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

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

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

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

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf.

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

I exist as I am, that is enough.

In the place where I am now, I look back over my life. I look back at the world I've left behind. What message do I want to leave? I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it. You may not find it. But your life matters, and you are here for a reason. And I just hope that that reason will become apparent as you live through your life. I want you to know that, whether or not you find that role that you find that role that you are supposed to play, your life does matter and that every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose the difference that you make.

If my body dies, let my body die, but do not let my country die.

Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look at the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.

The person who has lived the most is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one with the richest experiences.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. — You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

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.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.