Marcus Aurelius

"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart."

"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

"Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life."

"That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within."

"An angry countenance is much against nature, and it is oftentimes the proper countenance of them that are at the point of death. But were it so, that all anger and passion were so thoroughly quenched …"

"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."

"Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet."