“He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.”

Christian Bovee

“If you let fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.”

Katharine Butler Hathaway

“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires… courage.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.”

T.S. Eliot

“Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one.”

Ma in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

“Grow old with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hands Who sayeth ‘a whole I plant, Youth shows but half; Trust God; see all nor be afraid.’”

Robert Browning

“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”

Kahlil Gibran

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The tissue of life to be we weave with colors all our own, And in the field of destiny we reap as we have sown.”

John Greenleaf Whittier