So when you hear that even life and the like are indifferent, don’t become apathetic; and by the same token, when you’re advised to care about them, don’t become superficial and conceive a passion for externals.

Whenever externals are more important to you than your own integrity, then be prepared to serve them the remainder of your life.

Being attached to many things, we are weighed down and dragged along with them

Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. You are responsible for the good and bad in your life.

Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes or figs need time to ripen. If you say that you want a fig now, I will tell you to be patient. First, you must allow the tree to flower, then put forth fruit; then you have to wait until the fruit is ripe. So if the fruit of a fig tree is not brought to maturity instantly or in an hour, how do you expect the human mind to come to fruition, so quickly and easily?

Never get into family fights over material things; give them up willingly, and your moral standing will increase in proportion.

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.

To be sure, external things of whatever kind require skill in their use, but we must not grow attached to them; whatever they are, they should only serve for us to show how skilled we are in our handling of them.

Do as Socrates did, never replying to the question of where he was from with, ‘I am Athenian,’ or ‘I am from Corinth,’ but always, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’

Just prove to me that you are trustworthy, high-minded and reliable, and that your intentions are benign – prove to me that your jar doesn’t have a hole in it – and you’ll find that I won’t even wait for you to open your heart to me, I’ll be the first to implore you to lend an ear to my own affairs.

When you have done a good act and another has received it, why do you look for a third thing besides these, as fools do, either to have the reputation of having done a good act or to obtain a return?

If money is your only standard, then consider that, by your lights, someone who loses their nose does not suffer any harm.

It is not right that anything of any other kind, such as praise from the many, or power, or enjoyment of pleasure, should come into competition with that which is rationally and politically and practically good.

Perhaps the desire of the thing called fame torments you. See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the fickleness and lack of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of its domain, and be quiet at last.

Keep your head up in failure, and your head down in success.

An action committed in anger, is an action doomed to failure.

Or is it your reputation that’s bothering you? But look at how soon we’re all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space – and most of it uninhabited.

Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.

A brief existence is common to all things, and yet you avoid and pursue all things as if they would be eternal.

Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

Death and pain are not frightening, it’s the fear of pain and death we need to fear. Which is why we praise the poet who wrote, ‘Death is not fearful, but dying like a coward is.’

On the occasion of every act ask yourself, “How is this with respect to me? Will I regret it? A little time and I am dead, and all is gone”.

Speaking for myself, I hope death overtakes me when I’m occupied solely with the care of my character, in an effort to make it passionless, free, unrestricted and unrestrained.

What would you be glad you did – even if you failed?

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you’re alive and able – be good.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

When somebody’s wife or child dies, to a man we all routinely say, ‘Well, that’s part of life.’ But if one of our own family is involved, then right away it’s ‘Poor, poor me!’ We would do better to remember how we react when a similar loss afflicts others.

Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on forever.

Since it is possible that you might depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.

Think continually that all kinds of men, pursuits, and nations are dead.

How quickly things disappear: in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the memory of them.

Whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change. 

Finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements?

Death is necessary and cannot be avoided. I mean, where am I going to go to get away from it?

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.

One thing I know: all the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

Because we’re the only animals who not only die but are conscious of it even while it happens, we are beset by anxiety.

This, then, is consistent with the character of a reflecting man, to be neither careless nor impatient nor contemptuous with respect to death, but to wait for it as one of the operations of nature.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination.

(A tough one) There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.

I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.

To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it.