Echoes

There is not love of life without despair about life.

For in all adversity of fortune, the most unfortunate kind of misfortune is to have been happy.

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

There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow; but there is something in it so like virtue, that he who is wholly without it cannot be loved.

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

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

What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

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

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

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

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

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.