Meaning of “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.…”

The Soul of Man under Socialism; Wilde develops individualism as the freedom to form a life from within rather than conform to social expectation.

Walden; Thoreau contrasts one’s own deliberate track with paths chosen by others.

Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2, in the 1919 Yale Shakespeare edition edited by Lawrence Mason. Cassius tells Brutus that men can be masters of their fates and immediately continues, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ This is Cassius’s political persuasion inside the drama, not neutral historical evidence or Shakespeare speaking directly.

Moral printed after “Hercules and the Wagoner” in the Townsend translation; Hercules first tells the driver to help himself.

The Conduct of Life, essay II, “Power,” Project Gutenberg #39827. “Life is a search after power” appears at the opening of Emerson’s prose discussion after the verse epigraph and introduces his account of capacity, agency and human influence. It remains nineteenth-century Transcendentalist conduct-of-life philosophy rather than an empirical law of motivation or success.

All’s Well That Ends Well, Act I, Scene 1; Helena resolves to act rather than ascribe every possibility to fate. Verified against Wikisource’s 1910 facsimile transcription of the 1623 First Folio (folio spelling “Our remedies oft in our selues do lye”); direct evidence resolves to the reviewed Act I transcription.