“Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be in the understanding that does homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance.”
— Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series — Self-Reliance (1841)
“The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living”
— Plato, Apology
“It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
“No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“For even sheep do not vomit up their grass and show to the shepherds how much they have eaten; but when they have internally digested the pasture, they produce externally wool and milk. Do you also show not your theorems to the uninstructed, but show the acts which come from their digestion.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
“You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius
“are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?”
— Plato, Apology
“The universe is transformation: life is opinion.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Remember that it is not he who reviles you or strikes you, who insults you, but it is your opinion about these things as being insulting. When then a man irritates you, you must know that it is your own opinion which has irritated you.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
“Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius
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