We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of pleasure as the criterion of every good thing.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

The things you really need are few and easy to come by; but the things you can imagine you need are infinite, and you will never be satisfied.

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

Man was not intended by nature to live in communities and be civilized.

We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously.