When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them. It's good to keep this in mind.

Receive the gifts of fortune without pride, and part with them without reluctance.

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it - either gratefully better than or bitterly worse than something else that you alone choose.

If you separate from . . . everything you have done in the past, everything that disturbs you about the future . . . and apply yourself to living the life that you are living-that is to say, the present-you can live all the time that remains to you until your death in calm, benevolence, and serenity.

We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.