Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?'

The inner master, when confronted with an obstacle, uses it as fuel, like a fire which consumes things that are thrown into it. A small lamp would be snuffed out, but a big fire will engulf what is thrown at it and burn hotter; it consumes the obstacle and uses it to reach a higher level.

Leave the wrong done by another where the wrong arose.

To my great-grandfather I owed the advice to dispense with the education of the schools and have good masters at home instead - and to realize that no expense should be grudged for this purpose.

Severally on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself, if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing - here is the perfection of character.