Echoes

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things. For example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have appeared so to Socrates; but the judgment that death is terrible — that is the terrible thing.

We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. (1).

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

Though the whole world should praise him, he would not be stimulated to greater endeavour, and though the whole world should condemn him, he would not be depressed. So fixed was he in the difference between the internal judgement of himself and the external judgement of others.

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers / Which of themselves our minds impress; / That we can feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness.

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.