When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. Book II
If virtue promises good fortune and tranquility and happiness, certainly also the progress towards virtue is progress towards each of these things. Discourses
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. The Waves
The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary. Counsels and Maxims
Quotes