You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
~ Wendell Barry
Elsewhere, this is 4a600. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a245. — slipbox
Strive with your reason →
Sometimes →
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Elsewhere, this is 4a599. — slipbox
Far apart →
There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Elsewhere, this is 4a598. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a255. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a596. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a260. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a595. — slipbox
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
Elsewhere, this is 4a265. — slipbox