“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

“By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.”

“I think we make our own luck. Our parents give us life, but what we do with that life is our own responsibility.”

“We make our own fortunes and we call them fate.”

“We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.”

“We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.”

“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

“We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.”

“When shall we find an know
this birth of God within us?
Only when we concentrate
all our faculties within us
and direct them all towards God.
Then he will be born in us
and make himself our very own.
He will give himself to us as our own,
more completely ours than anything we have ever called our own.”

“We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.”