James > James's Quotes

“Success needs vision to see, passion to transcend, patience to withstand and the character to overcome failures.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

“The most pathetic person in the world is some one who has sight but no vision.”
― Helen Keller

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.”
― Helen Keller

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Turn your wounds into wisdom.”
― Oprah Winfrey

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

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let speech harmonize with life.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”
― Seneca, Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium: Latin Text

“Throw aside all hindrances and give up your time to attaining a sound mind”
― Seneca

“And what’s so bad about your being deprived of that?... All things seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body.”
― Seneca

“For the only safe harbour in this life's tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“While we are postponing, life speeds by”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works. No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Count your years and you'll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear - they do one harm after they're past and gone, not merely when they're in prospect. Even when they're over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal's anxiety doesn't end with the commission of the crime, even if it's undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don't do one any harm, they're fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate. [...] Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.”
― Seneca, Epistles 1-65

“If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.”
― Seneca

“Life, if you know how to use it, is long; but…many, following no fixed aim, shifting and… dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles 1-65

“If you have nothing to stir you up and rouse you to action, nothing which will test your resolution by its threats and hostilities; if you recline in unshaken comfort, it is not tranquillity; it is merely a flat calm.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“It is in no man's power to have whatever he wants, but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn't got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“I never spend a day in idleness; I appropriate even a part of the night for study. I do not allow time for sleep but yield to it when I must, and when my eyes are wearied with waking and ready to fall shut, I keep them at their task.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.”
― Seneca

“But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.”
― Seneca, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

“Only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Even for studies, where expenditure is most honorable, it is justifiable only so long as it is kept within bounds. What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is, not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.”
― Seneca, Treatises: On Providence, On Tranquility of Mind, On Shortness of Life, On Happy Life

“Warriors should suffer their pain silently.”
― Erin Hunter, Into the Wild