Most of my converse is with books.
Many a sight that is held a terror in the night-time, is turned to ridicule by day.
I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
But travel won’t make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered.
All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self.
Travelling doesn’t make a man a doctor or a public speaker: there isn’t a single art which is acquired merely by being in one place rather than another. Can wisdom, then, the greatest art of all, be picked up in the course of taking a trip? Take my word for it, the trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears.
And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long – he has existed long.
And he has taught us not just to recognize but to obey the gods, and to accept all that happens exactly as if it were an order from above.
We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.
Move to better company: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. If you like Greek company too, attach yourself to Socrates and Zeno: the one would teach you how to the should it be forced upon you, the other how to the before it is forced upon you.
Live with Chrysippus, live with Posidonius; they will give you a knowledge of man and the universe; they will tell you to be a practical philosopher: not just to entertain your listeners to a clever display of language, but to steel your spirit and brace it against whatever threatens.
We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too.
For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.
When she created us, nature endowed us with noble aspirations, and just as she gave certain animals ferocity, others timidity, others cunning, so to us she gave a spirit of exalted ambition, a spirit that takes us in search of a life of, not the greatest safety, but the greatest honour – a spirit very like the universe, which, so far as mortal footsteps may, it follows and adopts as a model.
We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is only the material for virtue, not virtue itself.
But first we have to reject the life of pleasures; they make us soft and womanish; they are insistent in their demands, and what is more, require us to make insistent demands on fortune.
Others are snatched from sight; we ourselves are being stealthily filched away from ourselves.
Present time is very brief, so brief, indeed, that to some there seems to be none; for it is always in motion, it ever flows and hurries on; it ceases to be before it has come, and can no more brook delay than the firmament or the stars, whose ever unresting movement never lets them abide in the same track.
But if you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means.
To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle.