"Yes, getting your wish would have been so nice. But isn't that exactly why pleasure trips us up? Instead, see if these things might be even nicer - a great soul, freedom, honesty, kindness, saintliness. For there is nothing so pleasing as wisdom itself, when you consider how sure-footed and effortless the works of understanding and knowledge are."
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.9
"The person who does wrong, does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves - making themselves evil."
~ Marcus Aurelius, Mediations, 9.4
"It's in keeping with Nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement, as if it were our very own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us."
~ Seneca, Moral Letters, 109.15
"Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue."
~ Zeno, as quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.1.26
"That which isn't good for the hive, isn't good for the bee."
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.54
"But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to Fortune, their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue, which requires nothing from chance, and therefore can't be either increased or diminished."
~ Seneca, On the Firmness of the Wise, 5.4
"Does the light of a lamp shine and keep its glow until its fuel is spent? Why shouldn't your truth, justice, and self-control shine until you are extinguished?"
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.15
