Thoreau's Walden

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment:
that if one advances confidently in
the direction of his dreams, and
endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours. He will
put some things behind, will pass an
invisible boundary; new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves
around and within him; or the old laws
be expanded, and interpreted in his favor
in a more liberal sense, and he will
live with the license of a higher order
of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear
less complex, and solitude will not be
solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."