But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible.
You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.
It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent, “I accept the terms, and feel no dread of the coming judgment.
Finding wealth an intolerable burden is the mark of an unstable mind.
Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists.
Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope,’ he says, ’and you will cease to fear.
Having in mind not how bravely I was capable of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss, I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our character can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.
If you want to determine the nature of anything, entrust it to time: when the sea is stormy, you can see nothing clearly.
The law does not make a man a soldier after fifty or a senator after sixty: men find it more difficult to gain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meanwhile, as they rob and are robbed, as they disturb each other’s peace, as they make each other miserable, their lives pass without satisfaction, without pleasure, without mental improvement.
He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.
The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are still admired.
Are you really going to tell me that philosophy taught the world to use keys and bolts on doors – which was surely nothing but a signal for greed?
In the ashes all men are levelled.
What could be more foolish than a man’s being afraid of people’s words? My friend Demetrius has a nice way of putting things when he says, as he commonly does, that to him the utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly. ‘What difference does it make to me,’ he asks, ’whether their rumblings come from their upper or their nether regions?
Is it not madness and the worst form of derangement to want so much though you can hold so little? Therefore, though you may increase your income and extend your estates, you will never increase the capacity of your bodies.
We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by.
Though by means of reason he can lead a life which will not bring regrets, yet there resides in this imperfect creature, man, a certain power that makes for badness, because he possesses a mind which is easily moved to perversity.
We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly;.
The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes. The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character.