Courage leads to heaven; fear leads to death.
He who does not want to die should not want to live. For life is tendered to us with the proviso of death. Life is the way to this destination.
Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.
True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.
No one is laughable who laughs at himself.
Anyone can stop a man’s life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.
I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.
Small sorrows speak great ones are silent.
Go on and increase in valor, O boy! this is the path to immortality.
Whatever is well said by another, is mine.
A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.
Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.
If sensuality were happiness, beasts were happier than men; but human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh.
The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.
The pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man. It is more powerful than external circumstances.
Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.
To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.
What were once vices are the fashion of the day.
Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.