We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the man who postpones the hour of living rightly, like the rustic who waits for the river to flow away before he crosses, waits for a river that flows on forever.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions. Love is a gift, not a tribute; and the man who expects it as a due has already forfeited the capacity to receive it.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs; the man does not.

The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen. And the man who is content with little is rich, while the man who is always wanting more is poor, though he have the world's wealth.

The thing about man is that he knows what other animals do not: that he must die. And though he tries to forget it, this knowledge pursues him through his days like a creditor he cannot pay.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it.

It is not the body's posture, but the mind's attitude that counts. A man may kneel in church and be spiritually proud, or stand in the marketplace and be inwardly at prayer.

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings, as the plant is a slave to the weather. But the man who has learned to live inwardly is never wholly at the mercy of circumstance, for he carries his world within him.

The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to seek to resolve.

The universe is transformation; life is opinion. Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain without; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.

A man's character is his fate. And yet we spend our lives constructing masks so elaborate that we forget the face beneath them — until sorrow strips it bare, and we meet ourselves for the first time.

The universe is not indifferent to our values. It is simply not in a hurry to confirm them. And in that delay — that terrible patience — we find either despair or philosophy.

A man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings, as the plant is a slave to the weather and the soil in which it grows.

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet it is precisely in the collision between our designs and reality's indifference that character is forged — not in triumph, but in the willingness to begin again.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference, the only dignified response is to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions which we have of things. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves — that is, our own opinions.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. And yet we cannot make peace with ourselves by turning away from the world; we can only do it by turning more deeply into it.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members, and the bond of union is reason itself.

It is not given to the world to be content; it is given to us to be content with the world. But there is a deeper discontent which is divine — the dissatisfaction of the possible with the actual.

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock of the air in motion.

We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you.

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

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public events or attending to private ones. There is never a moment when new distress is not succeeding old.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The vague promises of the future are enough to keep us tethered to the present without ever fully inhabiting it.

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the place they hold in our lives that gives them their character. Thus the smallest good act today is the conquest of the whole future.

We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another's than of our own.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

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

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness. The more we have, the less we are masters of what we have, and the more we are enslaved to it.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

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.