Meditations

A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values.

Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.

What we do now echoes in eternity.

The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.