Echoes

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

There are two kinds of pleasure: one consisting in a state of rest, in which both body and mind are undisturbed by any kind of pain; the other arising from an agreeable agitation of the senses, producing a correspondent emotion in the soul. It is upon the former of these that the enjoyment of life chiefly depends. Happiness may therefore be said to consist in bodily ease, and mental tranquility.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.

No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life. Yet even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. But this conviction must be firmly grasped and not merely adopted in words, if we wish to draw any strength from what we know.

He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.

Man knows much more than he understands.

There is no reason why poverty should call us away from philosophy—no, nor even actual want. For when hastening after wisdom, we must endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger when their towns were besieged, and what other reward for their endurance did they obtain than that they did not fall under the conqueror’s power? How much greater is the promise of the prize of everlasting liberty, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man! Even though we starve, we must reach that goal.

I would prefer inarticulate wisdom to loquacious foolishness.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply; and living simply is voluntary poverty.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

The person who has lived the most is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one with the richest experiences.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.