First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Life is a grindstone. Whether it wears you down or polishes you up depends on what YOU are made of.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. - Theodore H. White
Swami Vivakananda:"Real happiness is a state of mind wherein even the idea of happiness is totally gone, or is totally absent. This is akin to perfection. It comes only when everything is summed up in One, and nothing remains. Happiness is not in the objects near and far outside oneself. Restlessness to attain the ideal will help a lot."
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together.
-Jacob A. Riis, journalist and social reformer (1849-1914)