Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
I was not born for one corner; The whole world is my native land.
Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everythin...
Nūllum magnum ingenium sine mixtūrā dēmentiae fuit No great talent without an element of madness
The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. ...
Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause...
How many men soever you slay, you will never kill your successor.
Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.
Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it; ... in thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything depends on opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
The best ideas are common property
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
Here is your great soul —the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
It's not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.
Es ist nicht wenig Zeit, die wir haben, sondern es ist viel Zeit, die wir nicht nutzen.
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
At times we ought to drink even to intoxication, not so as to drown, but merely to dip ourselves in wine, for wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases . The in...
