Joshua Synon

“I felt that if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response neither approval nor opposition just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert.”
― Lu Hsun, Selected Stories

“A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him”
― Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

“A man’s greatness lies not in wealth and station, as the vulgar believe, not yet in his intellectual capacity, which is often associated with the meanest moral character, the most abject servility to those in high places and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man’s true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be right, without troubling himself, as the emperor says he should not, about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not do that which he thinks and says and does.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue