Quotes About Fulfillment

In the world to come they will not ask me, "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me, "Why were you not Zusya?"

If we do not rise to the challenge of our unique capacity to shape our lives, to seek the kinds of growth that we find individually fulfilling, then we can have no security: we will live in a world of sham, in which our selves are determined by the will of others, in which we will be constantly buffeted and increasingly isolated by the changes round us.

I have the feeling when I write poetry that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. You don't think about whether you're going to get money or fame, you just do it.

In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line. ... From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.

Each of us has some unique capability waiting for realization. Every person is valuable in his own existence, for himself alone ... each of us can bring to fruition these innate, God-given abilities.

Any talent that we are born with eventually surfaces as a need.

Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.

Are you doing the kind of work you were built for, so that you can expect to be able to do very large amounts of that kind and thrive under it? Or are you doing a kind of which you can do comparatively little?

The fun of being alive is realizing you have a talent and you can use it every day so it grows stronger.... And if you're in an atmosphere where this talent is appreciated instead of just tolerated, why, it's just as good as sex.

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what interests you and that you can do well, and put your whole soul into it-every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.

Man is not born to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out what he has to do ... within the limits of his comprehension.

The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming, and what one has in fact become.

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (i) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

Do what you love, the money will follow.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society-more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

We don't know who we are until we see what we can do.

If Heaven made him, earth can find some use for him.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants, lives so as to give a meaning and a value to his own life.

Few are they who have never had a chance to achieve happiness-and fewer those who have taken that chance.