Daniel Hwang > Daniel's Quotes

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
― Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

“The sun also shines on the wicked.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.”
― Plutarch

“Knowledge without courage is sterile.”
― Balthasar Gracian

“Life is a warfare against the malice of others.”
― Balthasar Gracian

“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.”
― arthur schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature

“What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.”
― Schopenhauer

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Receive without conceit, release without struggle.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“Do what you will. Even if you tear yourself apart, most people will continue doing the same things.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Art thou angry with him whose armpits stink? Art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me harm, why should they have any desire towards that? For what advantage would result to them from this or to the whole, which is the special object of their providence? But if they have not determined about me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at least, and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”
― Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

“In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

“Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations