oh, go for it then

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

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

A friend is a second self.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

• Friendship is essentially a partnership.

• Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.

• Happiness depends upon ourselves.

• Happiness is a sort of action.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

• Variant: Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

• My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
  • Variant: The best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
  • Variants: No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
    There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
    There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
• No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
  • Variants: Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
    Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.
• Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

• That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

• The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

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

• The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.

• The complete is more than the sum of its pieces.

• The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

• The end of labor is to gain leisure.

• The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.

• The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

• The secret to humor is surprise.

• The soul never thinks without a picture.

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

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

• To perceive is to suffer.

• To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

• We are what we repeatedly do.

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

• We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

• We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

• What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

• Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

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

• You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

• Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.