Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life.

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time.

For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us.

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.

Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them.

You can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been.

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

If you seek tranquillity, do less.

Love the discipline you know.

Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.

Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for?

Follow your own nature, and follow Nature—through everything that happens to you.

For there is a single harmony. Just as the world forms a single body comprising all bodies, so fate forms a single purpose, comprising all purposes.

Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

The best revenge is not to be like that.

To move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness.

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.

What injures the hive injures the bee.

No one can keep you from living as your nature requires. Nothing can happen to you that is not required by Nature.

Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.

What is outside my mind means nothing to it.

The mind in itself has no needs, except for those it creates itself. Is undisturbed, except for its own disturbances.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.

Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

It is peculiar to man to love even those who do wrong. And this happens if, when they do wrong, it occurs to thee that they are kinsmen.

Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What is dearer or more familiar to Universal Nature?

The mind without passions is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen.

Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.

Be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.

What you were born to do. A commitment to justice in your own acts. Which means: thought and action resulting in the common good.

All of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging.

No longer talk about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.

Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain.

Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—So is the race of men.

Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life.

Your three components: body, breath, mind. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title.

Straight, not straightened.

Not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment, a warm lotion.

Nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you.

If any one can convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured.