George D > George's Quotes

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
― Socrates

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
― Epictetus, The Enchiridion

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
― Seneca

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms -- you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.”
― Seneca

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
― Seneca

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it's not.”
― Richard Kadrey, Aloha from Hell

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune