Quotation Collection

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 - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" Marcus Aurelius

• rest
• comfort

This is the source.

If an action or utterance is appropriate, then it's appropriate for you. Don't be put off by other people's comments and criticism. If it's right to say or do it, then it's the right thing for you to do or say. Marcus Aurelius

• criticism

This is the source.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. Marcus Aurelius

• thought

This is the source.

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Marcus Aurelius

• tolerance
• discipline

This is the source.

It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance. Marcus Aurelius

• ignorance
• truth

This is the source.

The only thing that isn't worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don't. Marcus Aurelius

• patience
• truth
• tolerance

This is the source.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.

Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.

Sanity means tying it to your own actions. Marcus Aurelius

• self esteem
• ambition

This is the source.

Don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what? Marcus Aurelius

• help

This is the source.

Let the body avoid discomfort (if it can), and if it feels it, say so. But the soul is what feels fear and pain, and what conceives of them in the first place, and it suffers nothing. Marcus Aurelius

• fear
• pain

This is the source.

Unendurable pain brings its own end with it. Chronic pain is always endurable: the intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body, the mind remains undiminished. And the parts that pain affects - let them speak for themselves, if they can. Marcus Aurelius

• mind
• pain

This is the source.

Look at who they really are, the people whose approval you long for, and what their minds are really like. Then you won't blame the ones who make mistakes they can't help, and you won't feel a need for their approval. You will have seen the sources of both - their judgments and their actions. Marcus Aurelius

• self esteem

This is the source.

It's silly to try to escape other people's faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own. Marcus Aurelius

• tolerance
• patience

This is the source.

Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy. Marcus Aurelius

• humility
• duty

This is the source.

Either pain affects the body (which is the body's problem) or it affects the soul. But the soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquility. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them. Marcus Aurelius

• pain

This is the source.

The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them. Cullen Hightower

• government
• Congress

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Barry Goldwater

• liberty
• justice

Don’t read stuff by people who got successful by telling other people how to be successful. Brad Bollenbach

• self improvement
• success

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it - turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself - so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal. Marcus Aurelius

• adversity

This is the source.

Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, "Why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it?" You'll be embarrassed to answer. Marcus Aurelius

• pessimism

This is the source.

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress. James Boren

• bureaucracy

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. H. L. Mencken

• government

Give yourself a gift: the present moment.

People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as moral. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y? Marcus Aurelius

• legacy

This is the source.

The mind without passions is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever. Not to see this is ignorance. To see it and not seek safety means misery. Marcus Aurelius

• desire
• mind

This is the source.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. Jonathan Swift

• argument
• reason

To fear pain is to fear something that's bound to happen, the world being what it is - and that again is blasphemy. While if you pursue pleasure, you can hardly avoid wrongdoing - which is manifestly blasphemous. Marcus Aurelius

• pain
• fear

This is the source.

To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice - it degrades you. Marcus Aurelius

• justice

This is the source.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• vision
• leadership

Most of us serve our ideals by fits and starts. The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication. Cecil deMille

• purpose
• goals
• persistence

Isn't it better to do what's up to you - like a free man - than to be passively controlled by what isn't, like a slave or beggar? And what makes you think the gods don't care about what's up to us.

Start praying like this and you'll see.

Not "some way to sleep with her" - but a way to stop wanting to.

Not "some way to get rid of him" - but a way to stop trying.

Not "some way to save my child" - but a way to lose your fear.

Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens. Marcus Aurelius

• prayer
• fear

This is the source.

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? Marcus Aurelius

• fear
• death

This is the source.

As long as you do what's proper to your nature, and accept what the world's nature has in store - as long as you work for others' good, by any and all means - what is there that can harm you? Marcus Aurelius

• service

This is the source.

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them. Marcus Aurelius

• anger

This is the source.

How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well. Barry Goldwater

• politics
• freedom
• government
• democracy

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. Thomas Paine

• virtue
• children

Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy - these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. John Gatto

• education

There's nothing manly about rage. It's courtesy and kindness that define a human being - and a man. That's who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners. Marcus Aurelius

• anger
• guts

This is the source.

If you don't have a consistent goal in life, you can't live it in a consistent way. Marcus Aurelius

• goals

This is the source.

Everything you're trying to reach - by taking the long way round - you could have right now, this moment. If you'd only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you'd only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice. Marcus Aurelius

• fate

This is the source.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. Oscar Wilde

• democracy

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something. Wilson Mizner

• listening

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education. Walter Scott

• education

The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do. James Burke

• happiness

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious. Bertie Forbes

• pessimism

Your use of leisure largely determines your progress – invest it, don’t spend it. Fred Smith

• time management
• leisure

Race horses have more tension than mules, so you can’t expect the earnings of a thoroughbred and the placidity of a mule. Fred Smith

• personality

Decide on a way of life and then earn the money to finance it – don’t do it the other way around. Fred Smith

• wealth
• money

I have found you have a choice: laugh or have high blood pressure. Fred Smith

• humor

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself. George Bernard Shaw

• education

I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state. Max Belz

• education

Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest. William Shakespeare

• wealth
• speech

Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi

• tyranny
• truth
• optimism
• love

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals. William Penn

• evil
• morals
• politicians
• politics

If you can cut yourself - your mind - free of what other people do and say, of what you've said or done, of the things that you're afraid will happen, the impositions of the body that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance - doing what's right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth -

If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past - can make yourself, as Empedocles says, "a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness," and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present)...then you can spend the time you have left in tranquility. And in kindness. And at peace with the spirit within you. Marcus Aurelius

• calm

This is the source.

It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet. Marcus Aurelius

• circumstance

This is the source.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Albert Schweitzer

• encouragement