I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of her dreams, and endeavors to live the life which she has imagined, she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. She will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and with her; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in her favor in a more liberal sense, and she will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as she simplifies her life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
—Walden, Henry David Thoreau (by way of my friend, Heddy Nam)
