We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

Men are born for each other's sake, so either teach people or endure them

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.

It is a sin to persue pleasure as a good and to avoid pain as a evil.

The soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then, with a continuous series of such thoughts as these - that where a man can live, there - if he will - he can also live well.

Only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens; but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all.