Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

Recommended reading: Einstein: His Life and Universe.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

Recommended reading: Island.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however undramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on.

Recommend reading: An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy.

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

Recommend reading: The Greatest: My Own Story.

Crossing the river of change requires that you leave the same familiar predictable self – connected to the same thoughts, same choices, same behaviors, and same feelings – and step into a void of the unknown. The gap between the old self and the new self is the biological death of your old personality. If the old self must die, then you have to create a new self with new thoughts, new choices, new behaviors, and new emotions. Entering this river is stepping toward a new unpredictable, unfamiliar self. The unknown is the only place where you can create – you cannot create anything new from the known.

Recommended reading: Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One.

The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.

Recommended Reading: Great Expectations.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order…

Recommended reading: Baudelaire: Poems.

Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Recommended reading: The Portable Anaïs Nin.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Recommended reading: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fire.

Recommend reading: Maxims of Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld.