“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“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?”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“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.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“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 and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Born place: in Rome, Italy
Born date April 29, 0121
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“I suppose if I look on the bright side of things, this means that I can train you to do things the way I like them. But right now, I have a hard-on the size of Texas and I'm not exactly thrilled about it.”
― C.L. Parker, quote from A Million Dirty Secrets
“The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it!”
― Algernon Blackwood, quote from The Willows
“«Si aquella noche —pensaba yo— se hubiera acabado el mundo o se hubiera muerto uno de ellos, su historia hubiera quedado completamente cerrada y bella como un círculo.» Así suele suceder en las novelas, en las películas, pero no en la vida... Me estaba dando cuenta yo, por primera vez, de que todo sigue, se hace gris, se arruina viviendo. De que no hay final en nuestra historia hasta que llega la muerte y el cuerpo se deshace...”
― Carmen Laforet, quote from Nada
“The Plain Sense of Things"
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems
“We were a perfect match. I’m a talker; Laura is a listener. I am restless; she is calm. I can get a little carried away; she is practical and down-to-earth. Above all, she is genuine and natural. There is no phoniness about her. Her appeal was immediate and constant. In August, I went to visit my family in Kennebunkport, planning to stay for a week. After one night, I flew back to Texas to be with Laura.”
― George W. Bush, quote from Decision Points
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