No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms. – Variant: There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.
What we do now echoes in eternity.
Confine yourself to the present.
Each day provides its own gifts.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.
Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life.
If unwilling to rise in the morning, say to thyself, ‘I awake to do the work of a man.’
Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live.
Death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful – and hence neither good nor bad.
Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.
How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.
He does not write at all whose poems no man reads.
As for literature, thefts cannot harm it, while the lapse of ages augments its value.
The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it – either gratefully better than or bitterly worse than something else that you alone choose.
I am an old man and have had many worries, but most have never come to pass.