Status Updates From The Consolation of Philosophy

Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sigh of a judge who sees all things.

For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness.

if you have turned your mind to higher things, there is no need of a judge to award a prize; it is you yourself who have brought yourself to a more excellent state: but if you have directed your zeal towards lower things, do not look for punishment from without; it is you yourself who have plunged yourself into the worse condition

For bad fortune, I think, is more use to a man than good fortune. Good fortune always seems to bring happiness, but deceives you with her smiles, whereas bad fortune is always truthful because by change she shows her fickleness. Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens. ...by her flattery good fortune lures men away from the path of true good, but adverse fortune frequently draws men back to their true good

'Where lies unbending Cato, Brutus where?
A little fame lives on inscribed in stone,
A line or two of empty reputation:
We know their splendid names but not their selves.
You, too, lie utterly unknown to men
And no renown can render you well-known:
For if you think that fame can lengthen life
By mortal famousness immortalized
The day will come that takes your fame as well,
And there a second death awaits for you.'

'I cannot deny the speed with which I rose to prosperity. It is the very thing, in fact, which makes me burn with grief as I remember it. In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched is once to have been happy.'