“remember two things: i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. the present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have you cannot lose.”
“what we do now echoes in eternity.”
"thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which though the waves beat continually, yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted."
“the blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.”
“the first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. the second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
“reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
“your days are numbered. use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. if you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”
“whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: what fault of mine most nearly resembles the one i am about to criticize?”
“death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.”
"within a very little while, thou wilt be either ashes, or a sceletum; and a name perchance; and perchance, not so much as a name. and what is that but an empty sound, and a rebounding echo? those things which in this life are dearest but vain, putrid, contemptible. tho most weighty and serious, if rightly esteemed, but as puppies, biting one another: or untoward children, now laughing and then crying. as for