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Nothing is a greater barrier to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect.
To imagine that five hundred men, drawn from every corner of the kingdom, will make a good law! Is it not a dreary joke, for which the people will sooner or later have to pay? They have a change of masters, that is all.
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws… that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
That which I know immediately and intuitively transcends in certitude all other knowledge, for the certainty of it is bound up with the mind’s certainty of itself. I can no more doubt what I thus know than I can doubt my own existence.
Thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up
Thine own life’s means!
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit,
And look on death itself!
Mock the time with fairest show:
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
Better than worshipping gods is obedience to the laws of righteousness.
Through zeal, knowledge is gained. Through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost. Let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss, thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
In living creatures, ignorance of self is nature; in man it is a vice.
Carry religious principles into common life… Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past.
It is the spiritual always which determines the material.
Thought is parent of the deed.
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Be not disgusted, nor discouraged, nor dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles, but when you fail, return back again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature. Love this to which you return, and do not return to philosophy as if she were a master, but act like those who have tired eyes and apply a drenching with water. Then you will not fail to obey reason, and you will repose in it.
Always run in the short way, and the short way is the natural. Accordingly, say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble and warfare and all artificiality.
Say nothing more to yourself than what the first appearances report. Suppose that it has been reported to you that a certain person speaks ill of you. This has been reported, but that you have been injured has not been reported… Thus then always abide by the first appearances, and add nothing yourself from within, and then nothing hurtful happens to you.