(this should probably be in ongoing....) starting with my favorite

• 'what i must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. this rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meaness. it is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. it is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.' {emerson}
• 'we are born believing. a man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.' {emerson}
• 'i have tried in my way to be free.' {cohen}
• 'as you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.' {thoreau}
• 'what you do speaks so loudly that i cannot hear what you say.' {emerson}
• 'i have immortal longings in me.' {shakespeare}
• 'i am a transparent eyeball.' {emerson}
• 'for us, there is only trying. the rest is not our business.' {t.s. eliot}
• living is a form of not being sure. not knowing what next or how. the moment you know how, you begin to die a little.' {demile}
• 'the world is an astonishing place.' {glaser}
• 'life is a dictionary.' {emerson}
• 'do not be too timid or squeamish about your actions. all life is an experiment.' {emerson}
• 'be open to whatever comes next.' {cage}
• 'be it life or death, we crave only reality.' {thoreau}
• 'the only way to find your true self is through recklessness and freedom.' {ueland}
• 'Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be labelled as something unusual' {brecht}
• 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.' {emerson}
• 'to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting' (e.e. cummings)