When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic-what defines a human being-is to work with others.

God sees the inner spirit stripped of flesh, skin, and all debris. For his own mind only touches the spirit that he has allowed to flow from himself into our bodies. And if you can act the same way, you will rid yourself of all suffering. For surely if you are not preoccupied with the body that encloses you, you will not trouble yourself about clothes, houses, fame, and other showy trappings.

No one wearies of benefits received.

Wilt thou, then, my soul, never be good and simple and one and naked, more manifest than the body which surrounds thee?

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time-even when hard at work.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.