The imagination retains a passion for freedom. There are no rules for the imagination. It never wants to stay trapped in the expected territories. The old maps never satisfy it. It wants to press ahead beyond the accepted frontiers and bring back reports of regions no mapmaker has yet visited.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

….myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

“You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.”

“I say, ‘follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.’”

“You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself.”

“And one of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work, who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing, but should be doing something else and haven’t the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves.”

“You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.”

“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”

“Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else.”

“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

“You may have a success in life, but then just think of it – what kind of life was it [if] you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.”

“The most dangerous risk of all: The risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”

“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

“From a developmental perspective, real growth requires some qualitative shift, not just in knowledge, but in perspective or way of thinking. Growing is when the form of our understanding changes: we often call this ‘transformation.’”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back… Whatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

“We shall not cease from exploration; And the end of all our exploring; Will be to arrive where we started; And know the place for the first time.”

“[I]f you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living…”

“What we are afraid of is not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us.”