When you find your direction, check to make sure that it is the right one.
People find particular things, however, frightening; and it’s when someone is able to threaten or entice us with those that the man himself becomes frightening.
Is you naturally entitled, then, to a good father? No, only to a father. Is.
Whoever chafes at the conditions dealt by fate is unskilled in the art of life; whoever bears with them nobly and makes wise use of the results is a man who deserves to be considered good.
Resistance is vain in any case; it only leads to useless struggle while inviting grief and sorrow.
Faced with pain, you will discover the power of endurance. If you are insulted, you will discover patience. In time, you will grow to be confident that there is not a single impression that you will not have the moral means to tolerate.
If you decide to do something, don’t shrink from being seen doing it, even if the majority of people disapprove. If you’re wrong to do it, then you should shrink from doing it altogether; but if you’re right, then why worry how people will judge you?
Every circumstance comes with two handles, which one of which you can hold it, while with the other conditions are insupportable.
Whatever your mission, stick by it as if it were a law and you would be committing sacrilege to betray it. Pay no attention to whatever people might say; this no longer should influence you.
I have learned to see that whatever comes about is nothing to me if it lies beyond the sphere of choice.
Remember that in life you ought to behave as at a banquet. Suppose that something is carried round and is opposite to you. Stretch out your hand and take a portion with decency. Suppose that it passes by you. Do not detain it. Suppose that it is not yet come to you. Do not send your desire forward to it, but wait till it is opposite to you.
It is much better to die of hunger unhindered by grief and fear than to live affluently beset with worry, dread, suspicion and unchecked desire.
The wise person knows it is fruitless to project hopes and fears on the future. This only leads to forming melodramatic representations in your mind and wasting time.
Another person will not hurt you without your cooperation; you are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be.
Some young women confuse their self-worth with their ability to attract the attention of men, and so pour all their energies into makeup, clothing, and jewelry. If only they realized that virtue, honor, and self-respect are the marks of a true beauty.
I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read and write. Even if ‘all night long’ is added, I cannot say it – not until I know the focus of all this energy.
Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.
I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;” “I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours.” But you, after all, are neither property nor style.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself. abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don’t regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours.
If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did: – never, when asked one’s country, to answer, “I am an Athenian or a Corinthian,” but “I am a citizen of the world.