It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody; and I think it wiser to content a few, and let the multitude go whistle for what they get from me.

We are caught in a paradox: the more we study the conditions of courage, the more we see how few people have ever been free enough from want and fear to practice it. Courage is not a virtue but a grace — and perhaps the rarest of all.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Cut these questionings short, and accept the universe as it is, and work in it rather than to understand it.

It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without being worsted.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.

It is not by lying still in the dark and letting himself be gnawed that a man finds rest; but by watching over himself, and bravely bearing the strokes of existence.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

We are faces of the same humanity, and what injures one of us injures all of us; accordingly, let us stretch out our hands to those who have fallen. Above all, let us stretch them out as widely as possible, for those who have fallen farthest.

The universe is not cruel, nor is it kind — it is simply what it is, and we are the creatures who discovered sorrow by learning to want what it cannot give us.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. The way to make life worth living is not to guard the hours, but to fill them — not to preserve the days, but to use them.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

The mark of the historic is that the present moment always will have been. What we do now is irrevocable—it joins the permanent record of what has occurred, and in that sense the past is the only thing that cannot be taken from us.

We are all loosely fastened to the world, and to the opinions of others. The man who has learned to detach himself from things and from persons, and who has ceased to care overmuch about his own continuity, is in the best position to think clearly.

We shall make mistakes; and I venture to affirm that it is better to make every possible mistake, and to correct them all, than to be paralyzed by the fear of making any.

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.

We shall not pretend that life is all beauty; we shall, as tragic poets always do, start with evil, and only then show that the noblest response to evil is not flight from it but the courage to face it.

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by love for something outside ourselves.

A man may take to drink on account of his wife, but he ought never to take to drink on account of his wife's husband.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.

We are always dying. From the moment we are born, we begin the process of dying. We do not know how long we shall live—how many years or months or days.

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet one cannot stop from living in the world. This is the paradox of consciousness itself—that we become most fully alive precisely through our capacity to suffer.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The great majority of us are not in a position in life to choose our work in the sense of selecting a particular job. We find ourselves in a particular situation, born into a particular family, in a particular town, with particular talents and disabilities. And our duty is to make the best of it.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is an affront.

The more you own, the more it owns you. We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of how to live simply can save us.

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he would be none the better for the drinking; whereas, if he takes to reading, he will become wise.