Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.

Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and the worship of reason.

Live not one's life as though one had a thousand years, but live each day as the last.

The sinner sins against himself; the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming the worse by his own action.

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

Thou seest how few be the things, the which if a man has at his command his life flows gently on and is divine.

For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.