Long

Recognize your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. The world will provide you with every imaginable obstacle, but the one most difficult to overcome will be the lack of faith in yourself.

For every five minutes you spend looking into a mirror, spend five times that amount of time looking out at the world. Your happiness has a lot more to do with how you see the world than how the world sees you.

And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

Your B.A. does not belong to you alone, just as the earth does not belong to its present tenants alone. Your education was lent to you by women of the past, and you will give some back to living women, and to your daughters seven generations from now.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

Be a hero in your own life. Do the bold thing, do the honorable thing. Do the thing that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Do it for the simple heroic reason you feel it's right.

The hardest thing in the world is to let yourself know what you know. Because life is noisy. Everything we're told, everything about the way we're raised and educated and bombarded by our culture makes noise. And that noise makes it very hard to hear the ticking of our own hearts.

Your good friends from college may be the best friends you ever have. Guard those relationships like gold, work hard to maintain them. When they have a wedding, go across the country to be there. When one of them needs your help, cross the globe to give it to them.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Seventy-five percent of your education was paid for by your tuition, but twenty-five percent was paid for by people who never met you, through direct contributions to your endowment. They did not know who you were but gave generously so you could have your education.

He must cling fast to his faith in freedom and insist that freedom is the chief glory of mankind. He must not commit injustice or acquiesce when he sees it done by others.