Echoes

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.

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

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

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

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

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."

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.

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

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

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

Attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do. Hold to your true aspirations no matter what is going on around you.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

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

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

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.

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.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

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.

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.