It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.
We who are recovering from a prolonged spiritual sickness are in the same condition as invalids who have been affected to such an extent by prolonged indisposition that they cannot once be taken out of doors without ill effects.
Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving.
A person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.
None of us goes deep below the surface. We skim the top only, and we regard the smattering of time spent in the search for wisdom as enough and to spare for a busy man.
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He has tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.
We are born with a sense of the pleasantness of friendship just as of other things.
Si vis amari, ama.
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.
Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values.
Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal.
Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval – the former as much as the latter.
A balanced combination of the two attitudes is what we want; the active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined towards repose should be capable of action. Ask nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night.
For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths – and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.
Inwardly everything should be different but our outward face should conform with the crowd.
Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire; we shall make them, moreover, reluctant to imitate us in anything for fear they may have to imitate us in everything.
After a shipwreck, sailors try the sea again. The banker is not frightened away from the forum by the swindler. If one were compelled to drop everything that caused trouble, life would soon grow dull amid sluggish idleness;.
Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.
Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature: it is quite contrary to nature to torture one’s body, to reject simple standards of cleanliness and make a point of being dirty, to adopt a diet that is not just plain but hideous and revolting.
To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.