"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that
if one advances confidently in the direction of his
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will
pass an invisible boundary: new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves
around and within him; or the old laws be expanded
and interpreted in his favor a more liberal sense,
and he will live with the license of a higher order
of beings... If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should
be. Now put foundations under them.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed
and in such desperate enterprises? 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. It
is not important that he should mature as soon as an
apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within
you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought.
Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the
earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a
hummock left by the ice... what was the meaning of that
South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and
expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that
there are continents and seas in the moral world to
which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored
by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand
miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government
ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it
is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific
Ocean of one's being alone.-"
