There is a limit circumscribed to your time – if you do not use it to clear away your clouds, it will be gone, and you will be gone, and the opportunity will not return.
All is as thinking makes it so.
Men exist for each other. Then either improve them, or put up with them.
Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.
Glory arrives too late when it comes only to one’s ashes.
Know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.
No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
In death, Alexander of Macedon’s end differed no whit from his stable-boy’s. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.
Love only what befalls you and is spun for you by fate.
You are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.
Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what future time may be given you as uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.
Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power.
Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.
In the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid thee, that the pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bear in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination...
Waste not the remnant of thy life in those imaginations touching other folk, whereby thou contributest not to the common weal.
Have I done something for the general interest? Well then I have had my reward. Let this always be present to thy mind, and never stop doing such good.
Find time still to be learning somewhat good, and give up being desultory.
I’m going to be meeting with people today who talk too much – people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won’t be surprised or disturbed, for I can’t imagine a world without such people.