Whatsoever is, is in God.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.

I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.

Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.

The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.