“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
“The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.”
“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
“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.”
“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”
“Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”
My favorite book: “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. All these quotes above come from its pages. And these are but a fraction, randomly selected…
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
