“We must, therefore, pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it.”

The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.

It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.

Justice is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

The fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter and immortal one.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.

How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be.

MY REGRETS ARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE I COULDN’T SAVE—Marines, soldiers, my buddies. I still feel their loss. I still ache for my failure to protect them.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I will minimize your place in my life till your absence is no longer an issue.

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.

Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.

But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn’t freedom. It’s not control that’s lacking when one feels ‘free’, but the objectionable control of force.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me – they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are programs.