The one thing worth living for is to keep one's soul pure.

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.

But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you choose to retire into yourself.

Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both.

He does not write at all whose poems no man reads

Does the light of the lamp shine without losing its splendour until it is extinguished; and shall the truth which is in thee and justice and temperance be extinguished before thy death?

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.