When you actively engage in gradually refining yourself, you retreat from your lazy ways of covering yourself or making excuses. Instead of feeling a persistent current of low-level shame, you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation.

If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault... Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility except our own opinion.

You are a principal work, a fragment of [Goddess herself], you have in yourself a part of [her]. Why then are you ignorant of your high birth?

You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.

If what charms you is nothing but abstract principles, sit down and turn them over quietly in your mind: but never dub yourself a Philosopher.

If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.