Favorites from Aurelius
>This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
>Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous… Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does; or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed because no one admires it?
>A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.
Seneca
>If you wish to be stripped of your vices you must get right away from the examples others set of them. The miser, the swindler, the bully, the cheat, who would do you a lot of harm by simply being near you, are actually inside you.
> ‘Come now,’ you will be asking, 'are you saying that I should forget a person who has been a friend?’ Well, you are not proposing to keep him very long in your memory if his memory is to last just as long as your grief.
Epictetus
>Don’t confuse qualities that are found in the same writer only incidentally. If Plato had been strong and handsome, should I also try to become strong and handsome, as if this were essential to philosophy, since there was one particular philosopher who combined philosophy with good looks? Can’t you tell the difference between what makes people philosophers and the qualities that are only found in them by chance?
>Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
Bonus Emerson Relevant
> We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties or they will not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external world. The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.
>It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.