Omnes feriunt, ultima necat.
So – to the best of your ability – demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the part first of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.
Virtue is divided into two parts – into contemplation of truth, and conduct.
Everyone goes out of life just as if he had but lately entered it.” Take anyone off his guard, young, old, or middle-aged; you will find that all are equally afraid of death, and equally ignorant of life. No one has anything finished, because we have kept putting off into the future all our undertakings.
Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by action.
More active and commendable still is the person who is waiting for the daylight and intercepts the first rays of the sun; shame on him who lies in bed dozing when the sun is high in the sky, whose waking hours commence in the middle of the day.
No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing.
Good men are mutually helpful; for each gives practice to the other’s virtues and thus maintains wisdom at its proper level. Each needs someone with whom he may make comparisons and investigations.
No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.
A man’s past is forever set in stone. There.
Poverty brought into conformity with the law of nature, is great wealth.
They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.
That which is enough is ready to our hands.
Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.
Homo res sacra homini.
Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the endeavor to attain it.
And what is Bravery? It is the impregnable fortress for our mortal weakness; when a man has surrounded himself therewith, he can hold out free from anxiety during life’s siege; for he is using his own strength and his own weapons.
No man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom.
Those who wish their virtue to be advertised are not striving for virtue but for renown.
That which annoys us does not necessarily injure us; but we are driven into wild rage by our luxurious lives, so that whatever does not answer our whims arouses our anger.