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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The only true voyage →
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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The roller coaster →
Life is not ever going to be content. Life is never going to be normal. For the rest of your life you’re on a journey that has ups and downs and ups and downs, it is a roller coaster that never ends. Until one day you close your eyes and you’re off the roller coaster. And I think for me, I just want to be on as many different journey’s as possible, so at least if I’m on a roller coaster, there’s a new zigzag and a turn that I didn’t know about before.
~ Scooter Braun
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Men who are mortal →
But what if my friends there should die? What else could that signify except that men who are mortal have died? Do you at once wish to live to be old, and yet not to see the death of any one you love? Do you not know that, in a long course of time, many and various events must necessarily happen? That a fever must get the better of one person, a highwayman of another, a tyrant of a third?
~ Epictetus
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The modern struggle →
The modern struggle — Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising, up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games and addictive drugs.
~ Naval Ravikant
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Look back →
One never notices what has been done; One can only see what remains to be done.
~ Marie Curie
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The security of your condition →
Somebody has arrived from Rome. “I only hope there is no bad news.” Why, what harm can happen to you when you are not there? — Somebody has arrived from Greece. “I only hope there is no bad news.” Why, at this rate, every place can be the cause of misfortune to you. Is it not enough for you to be unfortunate where you are, but must you be unhappy on the other side of the sea also, and by letter? Such is the security of your condition!
~ Epictetus
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One great city →
…the world is one great city, and the substance out of which it is formed is single, and there must necessarily be a cycle of change, in which one thing gives way to another, and some things are destroyed and others come into being, and some things remain where they were and others are moved.
~ Epictetus
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Crows versus flatterers →
[Concerning our dealings with other people,] it is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive.
~ Antisthenes
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The school is a surgery →
The school of a philosopher is a surgery. You should not depart from it in pleasure, but in pain, for you are not healthy when you come in, but one of you has a dislocated shoulder, another an abscess, another a fistula, another a headache. And am I to come up with pretty thoughts and reflections, so that each of you will go away praising me, but with the same dislocated shoulder, the same aching head, the same fistula, and the same abscess that you brought in?
~ Epictetus
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