You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself…the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment…And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential…These are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.
- Confucius
When you do things with love, the prize is the doing, the result is a gift, and the love comes full circle and radiates. When you do things with love, that energy is felt—by you and others—because it leads you to do with presence, intention, and meaningfulness. Do with love.
- Edwin Adrian Nieves
Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
- Ernest Hemingway
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role, your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution. It has got to happen on the inside first.
- Jim Morrison
Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.
- Ansel Adams
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
- Henry Miller
Other people tend to value the way you value yourself.
- Lee Miller
It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
- Harriet Tubman
However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn't let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something.
- Vincent van Gogh
Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
- Victor Frankl
He who has a way to live for can bear almost any how.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
- Antonin Artaud
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.
- Isabel Allende
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
- Marcus Aurelius
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
- William James
You are the artist of your life. Your material is time. Your tool is action. Your life-work is your master-work.
- Edwin Adrian Nieves