Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Contentment

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

Death and Dying

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Desire

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Education

Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men.

Fame

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Friends and Friendship

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

Greed

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Hatred

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Justice

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

Life and Living

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Love

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

Nature

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Potential

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Respectability

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Senses

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

Wealth

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

Writers and Writing

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.