You are your own highest authority. Do not place your source of authority outside of you. Go within to see if the truth you've found is in harmony with the truth you find in your heart.
Interpretation
You should trust your own inner guidance rather than relying on external sources of authority.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-trust and introspection. It suggests that an individual’s true authority comes from within, urging them to look inside themselves to ascertain their own truths and align them with their inner feelings, rather than conforming to external expectations or beliefs.
In practice
During a motivational seminar about personal growth.
What you hope, you will eventually believe. _x000D_ What you believe you will eventually know. What you know, you will eventually create. What you create, _x000D_ you will eventually experience. What you experience, _x000D_ you will eventually express. What you express, _x000D_ you will eventually become. _x000D_ This is the formula for all of life.
Fear and guilt are your only enemies. Love and awareness are your true friends. Do not confuse one with the other, for one will kill you, while the other gives you life.
Your whole life is a message. Every act is an act of self-definition . Everything you think, say and do sends a message about you.
Love lets go. Need holds on. This is the way you can tell the difference between need and love. Let go of expectation, let go of requirements and rules and regulations that you would impose on your loved ones.
When you find peace within, you also find that you can do without. This means simply that you no longer need the things of your outside world, and not needing is a great freedom.
Giving up is not the answer. Neither is giving in. Stand your ground. There is a way of doing that without having to be combative. There is a way of hanging on to your true self, and demonstrating it, without resorting to aggression. But giving up and giving in is not the way. Simply and quietly claiming your right to be You is the way.
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me._x000D_ _x000D_ Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,_x000D_ _x000D_ Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,_x000D_ _x000D_ Creations and destroyings, all at once_x000D_ _x000D_ Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,_x000D_ _x000D_ And deify me, as if some blithe wine_x000D_ _x000D_ Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,_x000D_ _x000D_ And so become immortal.
It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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