Quotes About Philosophy

To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

Spend not the remnant of thy days in thoughts and fancies concerning other men, when it is not in relation to some common good, when by it thou art hindered from some other better work.

Now it is true that these may impede my action, but they are no impediments to my affects and disposition, which have the power of acting conditionally and changing: for the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and an obstacle on the road helps us along this road.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say. It is no evil for things to undergo change, and no good for things to subsist in consequence of change.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.

At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.

How cruel it is not to allow a man to strive after the things which appear to them to be suitable to their nature and profitable! And yet in a manner thou dost not allow them to do this, when thou art vexed because they do wrong. For they are certainly moved towards things because they suppose them to be suitable to their nature and profitable to them - But it is not so - Teach them, then, and show them without being angry.

It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must, bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the present.

You have embarked, made the voyage, and come to shore; get out. If indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, you will cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel, which is as much inferior as that which serves it is superior: for the one is intelligence and deity; the other is earth and corruption.

You should always look on human life as short and cheap. Yesterday sperm: tomorrow a mummy or ashes.

For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

in the ways of Nature there is no evil to be found.

Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it upwithout complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

I do my duty: other things trouble me not; for they are either things without life, or things without reason, or things that have rambled and know not the way.

Big drama of existence is not the death but never having began to live

things: and the vanity of praise, and the inconstancy

Detente particularmente en cada una de las acciones que haces y pregúntate si la muerte es terrible porque te priva de eso.

To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.

Everything has come into being for a purpose - a horse, say, a vine. Does this surprise you? Even the sun will say, 'I came into being for a purpose': likewise the other gods. For what purpose, then, were you created? For your pleasure? Just see whether this idea can be entertained.

If within the power of another, whom do you blame—atoms or gods? To do either is folly.

BEGIN the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.

The things which are ex­ternal to my mind have no re­la­tion at all to my mind.

I am unhappy, because this has happened to me." Not so: say, "I am happy, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.