Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.
In war there is no prize for runner-up.
Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.
A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.
The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.
No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley.
The comfort of having a friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.
Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.
Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.
How can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?
How much better to pursue a straight course and eventually reach that destination where the things that are pleasant are the things that are honorable finally become, for you, the same.
Let us fight the battle-retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.
We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!
You have to persevere and fortify your pertinacity until the will to good becomes a disposition to good.
A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.
Away with the world’s opinion of you-it’s always unsettled and divided.
There is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she doesn’t just fall to a person’s lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn’t go to anyone other than oneself to find her.
The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.
Death: There’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing that comes before it-the fear of it.