“The pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man. It is more powerful than external circumstances.”
“If sensuality were happiness, beasts were happier than men; but human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh.”
“Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.”
“Remember that pain has this most excellent quality. If prolonged it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged.”
“The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.”
“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
“Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets just like love or liquor.”
“There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.”
“If you live according to the dictates of nature, you will never be poor; if according to the notions of man, you will never be rich.”
“Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find.”
“Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.”
“We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.”
“It is another's fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.”
“Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.”
“The acquisition of riches has been to many not an end to their miseries, but a change in them: The fault is not in the riches, but the disposition.”
“Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.”
“Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”
“Happy the man who can endure the highest and the lowest fortune. He, who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity, has deprived misfortune of its power.”
“Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.”
“What should a wise person do when given a blow? Same as Cato when he was attacked; not fire up or revenge the insult., or even return the blow, but simply ignore it.”
“What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.”
“The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.”
“Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life -- in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.”
“Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!”
“I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.”
“No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.”
“The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.”
“I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?”
“That moderation which nature prescribes, which limits our desires by resources restricted to our needs, has abandoned the field; it has now come to this -- that to want only what is enough is a sign both of boorishness and of utter destitution.”
“As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.”