Virtue is shut out from no one; she is open to all, accepts all, invites all, gentlemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles; she selects neither house nor fortune; she is satisfied with a human being without adjuncts.
So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.
Life's like a play; it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
We gain so much by quickness, and lose so much by slowness.
The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves.
Remove severe restraint and what will become of virtue?
He who fears from near at hand often fears less.
It is only luxury and avarice that make poverty grievous to us; for it is a very small matter that does our business, and when we have provided against cold, hunger, and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.
The foundation of the true joy is in the conscience.
The state of that man's mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable.
Our (the Stoic) motto, as you know, is live according to nature.
The man who can be compelled knows not how to die.
Philosophy is the health of the mind.
When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.
Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance.
Live for thy neighbor if thou wouldst live for thyself.
Courage leads to heaven; fear leads to death.
My joy in learning is partly that it enables me to teach.
Whenever you hold a fellow creature in distress, remember that he is a man.
Self-denial is the best riches.
The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.
There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.
A man's ability cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be well-ordered, serious and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is contaminated.
The worst thing about getting old is evil men cease to fear you
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?
