If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.

Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?