Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculpture with wax. And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something else. Each existing only briefly. It does the container no harm to be put together, and none to be taken apart.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
~ Mortimer Adler
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Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:
~ Marcus Aurelius
– to accept this event with humility
– to treat this person as he should be treated
– to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in.
slip:4a533.
[I] will not be better than Socrates; but if I am not worse, that is enough for me. I shall never be a Milo, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property: Nor, in general, do we cease to take pains in any area, because we despair of arriving at the highest degree of perfection.
~ Epictetus
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Application and capacity. Eminence requires both. When both are present, eminence outdoes itself. The mediocre people who apply themselves go further than the superior people who don’t. Work makes worth.
~ Baltasar Gracián
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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
slip:4a551.
The attachment to beliefs is the greatest shackle. To be free is to know that one does not know.
~ Wu Hsin
slip:4a589.
The best revenge is not to be like that.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a530.
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
slip:4a305.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
~ Naguib Mahfouz
slip:4a404.
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
slip:4a539.
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
slip:4a353.
From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ Aldous Huxley
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It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave you in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them. Suspend judgement about them. And at once they will lie still, and you will be freed from fleeing and pursuing.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
~ Viktor Frankl
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.
~ Eric Hoffer
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Some men are preoccupied even in their leisure. In a country house, upon a couch, in the midst of solitude, though they are inaccessible to others, they are troublesome to themselves; their life cannot be called leisurely but rather a busy idleness.
~ Seneca
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