We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.
Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.
The word is half his that speaks, and half his that hears it.
There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?
A man must become wise at his own expense.
Though we may be learned by another’s knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.
Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.
If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.
The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.
Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.
I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s.
The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.
It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.
The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. That is why ignorance is so recommended by our religion as a quality suitable to belief and obedience.
Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he finds himself! not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in him alone belief gives itself being and reality.