The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

For any particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?

Nothing befalls a man except what is in his nature to endure.

In the same degree in which a man's mind is nearer to freedom from all passion, in the same degree also is it nearer to strength.

If this is neither my own badness, nor an effect of my own badness, and the common weal is not injured, why am I troubled about it? And what is the harm to the common weal?

If thou workest at that which is before thee ... expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces - to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What's thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it - and makes it burn still higher.