You will never come up against a greater adversary than your own potential, my young friend. – Michael Piller and Michael Wagner, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Evolution,”

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. – Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves. – William Shakespeare, “Coriolanus”

There are… things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes from the Underground,” 1864