A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
If you should ever turn your will to things outside your control in order to impress someone, be sure that you have wrecked your whole purpose in life. Be content, then, to be a philosopher in all that you do, and if you wish also to be seen as one, show yourself first that you are and you will succeed.
~ Epictetus
slip:4a15.
People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: You can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: Complete tranquility. And by tranquility I mean a kind of harmony.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a46.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~ Viktor Frankl
slip:4a36.
Do not, I beseech you, dread the things which the immortal gods apply to our souls like goads; disaster is virtue’s opportunity. Those whom an excess of prosperity has rendered sluggish may justly be called unfortunate; a dead calm holds them fast, as it were, on a motionless sea. And whatever befalls them comes as a surprise. Cruelty presses hardest on the inexperienced; the neck chafes at the yoke.
~ Seneca
slip:4a434.
Not to be driven this way and that, but always to behave with justice and see things as they are.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a1068.
All excesses are injurious, but immoderate prosperity is the most dangerous of all. It affects the brain, it conjures empty fantasies up in the mind, and it befogs the distinction between true and false with a confusing cloud. Is it not better to endure everlasting misfortune, with virtue’s help, than to burst with endless and immoderate prosperity? Death by starvation comes gently, gluttony makes men explode.
~ Seneca
slip:4a431.
The beginning of philosophy is this: The realization that there is a conflict between the opinions of men and a search for the origin of that conflict, accompanied by a mistrust towards mere opinion, and an investigation of opinion to see if it is correct opinion, and the discovery of a certain standard of judgement, comparable to the balance that we have discovered for determining weights, or the rule, for things straight and crooked.
~ Epictetus
slip:4a443.
I can say the same of a good man whom no difficult conjuncture has afforded an occasion for displaying the force of his mind. “I account you unfortunate because you have never been unfortunate. You have passed through life without an adversary; no one can know your potentiality, not even you.” For self-knowledge, testing is necessary; no on can discover what he can do except by trying.
~ Seneca
slip:4a437.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.
~ Paul Graham
slip:4a415.
If it’s confusion and anarchy, then be grateful that on this raging sea you have a mind to guide you. And if the storm should carry you away, let it carry off flesh, breath and all the rest, but not the mind. Which can’t be swept away.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a449.