Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"Don't go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one."

"If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance."

"Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground."

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."

"No man is happy who does not think himself so."

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts."

"What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne."

"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."

"All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion."

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."

"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."

"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."

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking."

"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."

"You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say."

"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts."