Strike Hard

I have only to let myself go! So I have said to myself all my life - so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and passionate youth. Yet I have never fully done it. The sense of it - of the need of it - rolls over me at times with commanding force: it seems the formula of my salvation, of what remains to me of a future. I am in full possession of accumulated resources - I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more - to do much more than I have done. The way to do it - to affirm one's self "sur la fin" - is to strike as many notes, deep, full and rapid, as one can. All life is - at my age, with all one's artistic soul the record of it - in one's pocket, as it were.
Go on, my boy, and strike hard... Try everything, do everything, render everything - be an artist, be distinguished to the last.

- Henry James (novelist) -Discovered in his journal, written in his later years, before he wrote his best works.