How many whose praises used to be sung so loudly are now relegated to oblivion; and how many of the singers themselves have long since passed from our sight!
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (7.6)
Tag: Quotations
“Human life is a play, assigning us roles we can scarcely fill.”
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (80.7)
Show me that the good life doesn’t consist in its length, but in its use, and that it is possible – no, entirely to common – for a person who has had a long life to have lived too little.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (49.10)
The Hammock Papers has sage advice for independents.
Read every day something no one else is reading…
Read the rest, and the source, here.
Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash
In the constitution of a rational being, I find no virtue implanted for the combating of justice, but I do find self-control implanted for the combating of pleasure.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (8.39)
He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.
Benjamin Franklin (1709 – 1790), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
This is known as the Ben Franklin Effect from Franklin’s note of “an old maxim” in his autobiography.
I have plenty of time, and so has everyone who wants it. No one is pursued by busyness. It’s people themselves who go after it and regard being busy as proof they are well off.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (106.1)
All Compositions of Matter fly off apace to the common stock and Receptacle: Spirits are quickly swallow’d up in the Soul of the Universe, and so is Memory and Fame in the Gulph of Time.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (7.10)
The above comes from this 1726 translation of Meditations…
The “Soul of the Universe” and the “Gulph of Time” are maybe more evocative than the more recent version from Gregory Hays:
All substance is soon absorbed into nature, all that animates it soon restored to the logos, all trace of them both soon covered over by time.
The gentleman enters into associations but not cliques; the small man enters into cliques but not associations.
Confucius (551-479 BC), The Analects, Book II, para 14
In talk, mark carefully what is being said, and when action is afoot, what is being done. In the latter case, look at once to see what is purposed; and in the other, make certain what is meant.
Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (7.4)