Echoes

Home is where the heart is.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Make an island of yourself, make yourself your refuge; there is no other refuge. Make truth your island, make truth your refuge; there is no other refuge.

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

We place the happy life in the security of the mind and in freedom from all obligations.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

I have arrived. I am home. In the here, in the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

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

In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow — I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.

Nowhere you can go is more peaceful — more free of interruptions — than your own soul.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

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

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.

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

God rests in Himself, and makes all things rest in Him.

If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don't give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.