Yoshida Shoin Quotes

As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.

Everyone's terrified of being mediocre. Everyone wants to be special.

I never intended to become a run-of-the-mill person.

We can’t all be better than everyone else.

I cannot - nor will not - be ordinary. I have to keep training and seeking and growing. I have to stay hungry. It is my will and so has become my nature.

The first step toward becoming extraordinary is, of course, to stop being ordinary.

You don't have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, for getting by, for working all night.

I've always had this deep-down conviction that I'm not like everybody else, and there's an amazingly exciting new life waiting for me just around the corner.

Every woman has a different metabolism and different genetics, so rather than compete with one another, concentrate on yourself and be the best you can be.

When I was born, I always knew something was a little bit different about me.

I always felt as a kid that I was underappreciated, invisible or weird, but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I'm always putting that message out there.

The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.

Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

You are not a special snowflake.

I was motivated to be different in part because I was different.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

For me, I like to push myself... I hate feeling complacent or that I'm not learning.

I just want to be the best Carly Rae I can be.

I just need to believe that we're not in some form of stasis, that we can try to be whoever we want to be. We probably won't get there, but we might get a little bit closer, you know?

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.

I never said to be like me, I say to be like you and make a difference.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

In preindustrial times, the idea of creating something was more related to your personality. Personality was something that you constructed; it's something you had to actively develop and work on. Now personality is something that you have.

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.