“Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.”

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out.

Nature does nothing uselessly.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Wise men speak when they have something to say, fools speak because they have to say something.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Philosophy can make people sick.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

We make war that we may live in peace.

The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived.

I always wanted to live a man’s life in a woman’s body.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Whatever my fate, I’ll go to it laughing.

Weep not for me. Rather let your tears flow for the sorrows of the multitude. My work is done. Like a ripe fruit I admit the gathering. Death has no terrors for it is a wise law of nature. I am ready whenever the summons may come.