Quote collection
45 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,'? says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away."
"Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it."
"If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?"
"Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it - even if we so desired."
"Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away."
"Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law."
"He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy."
"Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him."
"Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top"
"Nothing is miserable unless you think it so."
"So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [...] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood."
"He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered."
"In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy."
"One's virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune."
"Love has three kinds of origin, namely: suffering, friendship and love. A human love has a corporal and intellectual origin."
"So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity."
"Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don't you agree?"
"A person is an individual substance of a rational nature."
"And no renown can render you well-known: For if you think that fame can lengthen life By mortal famousness immortalized, The day will come that takes your fame as well, And there a second death for you awaits."
"In omni adversitate fortunæ, infelicissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune."