Circumstances are the rulers of the weak they are but the instruments of the wise.
~ Samuel Lover
Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of.
~ Geri Weitzman
Circumstances-what are circumstances? I make circumstances.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte
Man is not the creature of circumstances circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents and man is more powerful than matter.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
~ Christian Bovee
We will either find a way or make one.
~ Hannibal
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
~ George Bernard Shaw
Choice of attention-to pay attention to this and ignore that-is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.
~ W. H. Auden
Heaven and hell is right now. ... You make it heaven or you make it hell by your actions.
~ George Harrison
Freedom means choosing your burden.
~ Hephzibah Menuhin
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
~ Henry Miller
You have to take it as it happens but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.
~ Old German Proverb
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
~ Edward Gibbon
A life of reaction is a life of slavery intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action not reaction.
~ Rita Mae Brown
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
~ Cathy Better
The proverb warns that You should not bite that hand that feeds you. But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
~ Thomas Szasz
If we live good lives the times are also good. As we are such are the times.
~ Saint Augustine
Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.
~ Herbert Otto
They have rights who dare defend them.
~ Roger Baldwin
Make good use of bad rubbish.
~ Elizabeth Beresford
Things alter for the worse spontaneously if they be not altered for the better designedly.
~ Francis Bacon
Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
~ James A. Garfield
Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.
~ Dag Hammarskjöld
Some leaders are born women.
~ Geraldine Ferraro
Be thine own palace or the world's thy jail.
~ John Donne
A filly who wants to run will always find a rider.
~ Jacques Audiberti
Each of us makes his own weather determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
~ Fulton J. Sheen
Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
~ Josiah Royce
Be yourself and think for yourself and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
~ Elbert Hubbard
Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things our own meditation must form our judgement.
~ Isaac Watts
He who has no opinion of his own but depends upon the opinion and taste of others is a slave.
~ Friedrich Klopstock
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks but only at what he does himself to make it just and holy.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Let me listen to me and not to them.
~ Gertrude Stein
The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.
~ Charles W. Eliot
Learn to depend upon yourself by doing things in accordance with your own way of thinking.
~ Grenville Kleiser
If we are not responsible for the thoughts that pass our doors we are at least responsible for those we admit and entertain.
~ Charles B. Newcomb
Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.
~ Doris Lessing
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor both to yourself and to your country let men label you as they may.
~ Mark Twain
The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily.
~ Plato
Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment or it will run to weeds.
~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
