Consider all that you’ve gone through, all that you’ve survived. And that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. How many good things have you seen? How much pain and pleasure have you resisted? How many honors have you declined? How many unkind people have you been kind to?
~ Marcus Aurelius
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The attachment to beliefs is the greatest shackle. To be free is to know that one does not know.
~ Wu Hsin
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The best revenge is not to be like that.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
~ Naguib Mahfouz
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That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. Pride is a master of deception: When you think you’re occupied in the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
~ A. A. Milne
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…but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: You can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
~ Peter Thiel
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The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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