“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 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.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

If they don’t appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.

I have decorated your absence with every flower you hate. I end up hating em all.