“Responsibility to Yourself; Expect Great Things to Happen”
“Each of us lives dependent and bound by our individual knowledge and our awareness. All of that is what we call reality. However, both, knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One’s reality might be another’s illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies.” (Itachi Uchiha)
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“People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel like that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.” (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist)
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“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you … it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: ‘I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions — predigested books and ideas … marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short. … It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work; insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be ‘different’… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.” (Adrienne Rich)
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“Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.” (Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper)
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“She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.” (Zelda Fitzgerald)
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Catalyst Quotes 