Self Determination Quotes

The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.

~ Mark Cain

Life is still better than University. In school, your teacher is the fruit picker and you are the open fruit basket. Then you take those fruits and make cakes and pies. But life is going to give you the chance to go out there and pick those fruits yourself. Then you can eat them, or make them into something else; any which way, your own hands picked them!

~ C. Joybell C.

We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Concentrate and complete the journey.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest gift for yourself is to study to the highest degree.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I wonder how many books you have read?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Possibilities exist for you, to educate yourself, to the highest degree.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Make time to read.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Awake. Reach out. Press onward.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You ought to write down your goals. It serves as a guidepost and gives strength for purposeful action.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

May you find the confidence and courage to climb new heights.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

How the story will end, no one knows? We can only envisage.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Dare the impossible. By grace it will be possible.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Find the will power and begin to chase your dreams.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My life is build around books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It can be done. It will be done.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.

~ John Lubbock

Focus! (said a voice within me). We are here to craft emotions. To become a better person. Not to waste our serenity on someone who had a poor upbringing and are not taught manners.

~ Efrat Cytbulkiewicz

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.

~ Jane Austen

Look forward, in the direction of sunshine.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Rationality and calm self-determination were one of the great illusions of the universe... in the end, we were all ruled by our passions.

~ Michael R. French

(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ... We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us.

~ Elizabeth I

Work hard to fulfill your dreams.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Act as if it was and it will be.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You have to believe in your dreams.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest energy must be use for work.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

~ Charlotte Brontë

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

~ Coco Chanel

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I'm single because I was born that way.

~ Mae West

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

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

You can do anything you want. You don't believe me. You think, she's out of her head. Yeah, I'm out of my head- on being me. What are you on? On being them. You don't even know. I bet you were never given a chance to know. ....Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words.... You are anything...everyone, anyone. ...You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep aroung you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. ...Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful.

~ Melvin Burgess

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

~ Elizabeth I

There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.

~ Greta Garbo

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

~ Sam Harris

It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Wouldn't it be possible for us just to banish these men from our lives, and escape their carping and jeering once and for all? Couldn't we live without them? Couldn't we earn our living and manage our affairs without help from them? Come on, let's wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honour and dignity that they have usurped from us for so long. Do you think that if we really put our minds to it, we would be lacking the courage to defend ourselves, the strength to fend for ourselves, or the talents to earn our own living? Let's take our courage into our hands and do it, and then we can leave it up to them to mend their ways as much as they can: we shan't really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them.

~ Moderata Fonte

[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

~ Elizabeth I

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

~ Núria Añó