Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

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 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.

Everything good is costly and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

You and only you are responsible for your life choices and decisions.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.