Backlog Studies, "Second Study” (1873).
“We make our own fortunes and we call them fate.”
“For those things which were done either by our fathers, or ancestors, and in which we ourselves had no share, we can scarcely call our own.”
Nam genus et proavos et quae non fecimus ipsi,
Vix ea nostra voco.
Metamorphoses (Transformations)
“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.”
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
"Politics" http://www.ingo-heinemann.de/Politik.htm (13 February 1965).
Scientology Policy Letters
Source: The Complete Essays
“Each work of art generate its own rules”
Singing School
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Eminent Indians (1947)
Context: We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason.
“If great renown is won by true merit, and if virtue is considered in itself and apart from success, then all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift.”
Si veris magna paratur
fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto
inspicitur virtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo
maiorum, fortuna fuit.
Book IX, line 593 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
