Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
~ William Shakespeare
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do content.
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
When thus prepared
And when you are thus prepared and thus trained to distinguish what is not your own from your own, what is subject to hindrance from what is not, to regard the latter as your concern and the form as not, and carefully keep your desire directed toward the latter, and your aversion directed towards the former, will there any longer be anyone for you to fear?
~ Epictetus
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More sweet than truth
I have known days like that, of warm winds drowsing in the heat of noon and all of summer spinning slowly on its reel, days briefly lived, that leave long music in the mind more sweet that truth; I play and rewind.
~ Russel Hoban
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Great and noble and valuable
Further, then, answer me this: Do you think freedom to be something great and noble and valuable? — “How should I not?” Is it possible, then, that he who acquires anything so great and valuable and noble should be mean-spirited?
~ Epictetus
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Normal
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
~ Albert Camus
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More reason to worry
For even peace itself will supply more reason for worry. Not even safe circumstances will bring you confidence once your mind has been shocked—once it gets in the habit of blind panic, it can’t provide for its own safety. For it doesn’t really avoid danger, it just runs away. Yet we are exposed to greater danger with our backs turned.
~ Seneca
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Conformity
I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.
~ Rita Mae Brown
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The source of all human evils
Why, do you not reflect, then, that the source of all human evils, and of mean-spiritedness and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death? Discipline yourself, therefore, against this. To this let all your discourses, readings, exercises, tend. And then you will know that in this way alone are men made free.
~ Epictetus
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Another
The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which lasts forever.
~ Anatole France
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What did he trust in?
When Odysseus was shipwrecked and cast ashore … what did he trust in? Not in reputation, or riches, or office, but in his own strength, that is to say, in his judgements about what things are in our power and what are not. For these judgements alone are what make us free, make us immune from hinderance, raise the head of the humiliated, and make them look into the faces of the rich with unaverted eyes, and into the faces of tyrants.
~ Epictetus
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Shaken from what?
Ought you not first to have acquired something by the use of reason, and then to have made that secure? But you are studying to be able to prove things in argument. Prove what, though? You are studying so as not to be shaken by fallacious arguments. Shaken from what? Show me first what you are watching over, what you are measuring, or what you are weighing; and then, accordingly, show me your balance.
~ Epictetus
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Sometime in the future
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
~ David Eagleman
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Civilization
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
~ Wendell Barry
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Unchangeable
As if all was safe and well with you, you have dwelt upon the final area of study, which has to do with unchangeability, so that you can make yourself unchangeable—in what? Your cowardice, means-spiritedness, admiration for the rich, your failure to achieve what you desire, and your lack of success in avoiding what you want to avoid. These are the things that you have been laboring to secure.
~ Epictetus
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Strive with your reason
Furthermore, when your imagination gnaws at you (for that is something outside your control), strive against it with your reason, subjugate it, do not allow it to gain strength, nor to advance to the next stage of picturing what it wants as it wants.
~ Epictetus
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Sometimes
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
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Far apart
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
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Proper training
What, then, is the proper training for this? Firstly, the highest and principal form of training, and one that stands, so to speak, right at the entrance way to the enterprise, is, that when you become attached to something, let it not be as though it were to something that cannot be taken away, but rather, as though it were to something like an earthenware pot or crystal goblet, so that if it happens to be broken, you may remember, what kind of thing it was, and not be distressed.
~ Epictetus
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The only true voyage
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
~ Marcel Proust
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What room for an abject mind?
When you have acquired a contempt for things that are external and lie outside the sphere of choice, and have come to regard none of them as your own, but only this as your own, to judge and think aright, and exercise your impulses, desires and aversions aright, what further room is there after that for flattery, what room for an abject mind?
~ Epictetus
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