“Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.”

Book V, ch. i
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of our destiny. … Theoretic truths not only are disputable, but their whole meaning and force lie in their being disputed, they spring from discussion. They live as long as they are discussed, and they are made exclusively for discussion. But destiny — what from a vital point of view one has to be or has not to be — is not discussed, it is either accepted or rejected. If we accept it, we are genuine; if not, we are the negation, the falsification of ourselves. Destiny does not consist in what we feel we should like to do; rather is it recognised in its clear features in the consciousness that we must do what we do not feel like doing.
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

Original: Il legame tra noi e la musica consiste nello scegliere ciò che ci piace e ci fa star bene, non ciò che ci viene imposto.
Source: prevale.net

Considerations by the Way
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Source: Where the Heart Leads

The Artist's Way (1992), p. 108

Ships and Havens, ch. 2 (1898).

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: !-- ~28m57s -->Because too much we have lived in the light of the idea that your ideology will be dictated to you essentially by geography! And if you're born in India, you'll find out that the Cosmos is one way; if you're born in Brooklyn, you find out it's another way. What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be.