Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.
It is quality rather than quantity that matters.
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
You have been given your own work to do. Get to it right now, do your best at it, and don’t be concerned with who is watching you. Create your own merit.
It is not things in themselves which trouble us, but our opinions of things.
Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power.
You can be invincible, if you enter into no contest in which it is not in your power to conquer.
When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance revert at once to yourself and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it.
Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.
Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.
Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.
Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.
He who pays no attention to what his neighbor does, says or thinks, preferring to concentrate on making his own actions appropriate and justifiable, better uses his time.
Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow the divine.
Whatever may happen to you was prepared for you from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of your being.
Your task is to stand straight; not to be held straight.
Discard everything except these few truths: we can live only in the present moment, in this brief now; all the rest of our life is dead and buried or shrouded in uncertainty. Short is the life we lead, and small our patch of earth.
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.