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It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.
Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must, believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it is easier to maintain control.
If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity.
Another person will not hurt you without your cooperation; you are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be.
Let silence be your goal for the most part; say only what is necessary, and be brief about it.
because, you know, if a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.
If you decide to do something, don’t shrink from being seen doing it, even if the majority of people disapprove. If you’re wrong to do it, then you should shrink from doing it altogether; but if you’re right, then why worry how people will judge you?
If your silence is taken for ignorance, but it doesn’t upset you – well, that’s the real sign that you have begun to be a philosopher.
Sheep don’t bring their owners grass to prove to them how much they’ve eaten, they digest it inwardly and outwardly bring forth milk and wool.
The mark and attitude of the ordinary man: never look for help or harm from yourself, only from outsiders. The mark and attitude of the philosopher: look for help and harm exclusively from yourself.
How long will you wait before you demand the best of yourself, and trust reason to determine what is best?
waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.
But if each of us could have the tally of his future years set before him, as we can of our past years, how alarmed. would be those who saw only a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them!
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
there is nothing that the passage of time does not demolish and remove.
but believe me it is better to understand the balance sheet of one’s own life than of the corn trade.
Some men, after they have crawled through a thousand indignities to the supreme dignity, have been assailed by the gloomy thought that all their labours were but for the sake of an epitaph.
Remove the judgement, and you have removed the thought ‘I am hurt’: remove the thought ‘I am hurt’, and the hurt itself is removed.
You are a soul carrying a corpse,
‘It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’
Because such a thing could have happened to any man, but not every man could have borne it without pain.
So you ought to be one of those who, in a sense, are unconscious of the good they do.
Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.
Nothing happens to any creature beyond its own natural endurance.
Don’t let the impression of other people’s grief carry you away indiscriminately.
‘There was a time when I met luck at every turn.’ But luck is the good fortune you determine for yourself: and good fortune consists in good inclinations of the soul, good impulses, good actions.
Because the corruption of the mind is much more a plague than any such contaminating change in the surrounding air we breathe.
make yourself simpler, and better.
if, as I say, you separate from this directing mind of yours the baggage of passion, time future and time past, and make yourself like Empedocles’ ‘perfect round rejoicing in the solitude it enjoys’, and seek only to perfect this life you are living in the present, you will be able at least to live out the time remaining before your death calmly, kindly, and at peace with the god inside you.
I have often wondered how it is that everyone loves himself more than anyone else, but rates his own judgement of himself below that of others.
So it is that we have more respect for what our neighbours will think of us than we have for ourselves.
Who is not himself the cause of his own unrest?
The gladiator puts down or takes up the sword he uses, but the boxer always has his hands and needs only to clench them into fists.
The light of a lamp shines on and does not lose its radiance until it is extinguished. Will then the truth, justice, and self-control which fuel you fail before your own end?
Wanting the bad man not to do wrong is like wanting the fig-tree not to produce rennet in its figs, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh, or any other inevitable fact of nature. What else can he do with a state of mind like his? So if you are really keen, cure his state.
If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.
I have not seen my own soul either, and yet I honour it. So it is with the gods too: from my every experience of their power time after time I am certain that they exist, and I revere them.
