“What I must do is all that concerns me,
not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”
“Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.”
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”
“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstaces grow,
he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”
“To put away aimlessness and weakness,
and to begin to think with purpose,
is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment; who make all conditions serve them, and who think strongly, attempt fearlessly, and accomplish masterfully.”
-James Allen
—Photo by
aprilzosia.