D > D's Quotes

“Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“Open your door to that which must go,
for the loss becomes unseemly when obstructed.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies: a collection of proverbs, aphorisms and maxims