Reader > Reader's Quotes

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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

“Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Essays

“Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works

“When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?
A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters

“It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body; for it is better to die than to live badly.”
― Epictetus

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

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

“They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”
― Seneca

“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
― Seneca

“If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according what others think, you will never be rich.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”
― Seneca

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool ”
― Seneca, Moral Essays, Volume I: De Providentia. De Constantia. De Ira. De Clementia

“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“While we wait for life, life passes”
― Seneca

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche