Lili > Lili's Quotes

“Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“To understand is to forgive.”
― Pascal

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”
― Epictetus

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”
― Epictetus

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

“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
― Epictetus

“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master;
he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
― Epictetus

“To accuse others for one's own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.”
― Epictetus

“It's better to be impulsive than cautious; fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust. You'll see she's more likely to yield that way than to men who go about her coldly. And being a woman she likes her men young, because they're not so cagey, they're wilder and more daring when they master her.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“We view memories as archives of past events—of what has actually happened. But in reality, memories are nothing more than descriptions of what we think happened.”
― Mo Gawdat, Solve For Happy: An original, insightful guide to finding joy

“Biologically speaking, feeling good plays an important role as part of our survival machine. Our brains use it to drive survival behaviors that do not relate to immediate threats. To achieve that, our brains flood our bodies with serotonin, oxytocin, and other feel-good chemicals during acts they want to encourage us to do more often.”
― Mo Gawdat, Solve For Happy: An original, insightful guide to finding joy

“Life, however, sometimes needs to give you a nudge in order to alter your path. It uses a bit of hardship to lead you to something good. In”
― Mo Gawdat, Solve For Happy: An original, insightful guide to finding joy