“A cucumber is bitter.” Throw it away. “There are briars in the road.” Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, “And why were such things made in the world?”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (c. 180 A.D.).
And what is reason? Be she thus defined:
Edward Young, The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (1742–45), VII. L. 1,526.
Reason is upright stature in the soul.
While Reason drew the plan, the Heart inform’d
James Thomson (1700–1748), Liberty ( (1734) Pt. IV, L. 262.
The moral page and Fancy lent it grace.
The philosophy of my heart is libertarian. I don’t like the idea of the exploitation of man by man. I believe that one day human civilization will overcome this somehow. But that is not to say that I favour the state as the owner of everything, no, no, no. I can’t conceive of that. I lean a lot towards self-management, with all of the risks it entails for any important institution.
José Mujica (Uruguay’s president, 2010–2015), from “A conversation with President José Mujica, M.R. and H.C. Montevideo,” The Economist (August 2014).
What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
The chaplain in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Part Two, Chapter 3.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
Jean de La Bruyère, as quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century-XX Century, with English Translations (1913), pp. 132-133, by James Raymond Solly. Not sourced beyond that, however.
The wise man looks into space and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big, for he knows that, there is no limit to dimensions.
Master Zhuang, from 莊子/秋水.
For the discovery of truth, your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this power: you must be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must have the assayer’s sense for sound and true or forged coin. . . .
Lucian, in his dialogue Hermotimus.
For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a.33.
If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.
Seneca the Younger, Letter XVII of Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius).