Empowerment

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.

I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

When you are alone you are all your own.

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,

We all make our limits, and we set them further out than we have any right.

 

A woman’s time of opportunity is short, and if she doesn’t seize it, no one wants to marry her, and she sits watching for omens.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you somebody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

Be a governess! Better be a slave at once!

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

A WOMAN HAS TO LIVE HER LIFE, OR LIVE TO REPENT NOT HAVING LIVED IT.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them that by way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination, and prejudice, but through them, we are coming up. And with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress.