Echoes

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

Life is a journey, not a destination.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

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.

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

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

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.

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

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

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.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life.

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

He who lives sees much. He who travels sees more.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

All life is problem-solving.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

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.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.