1
There is no royal road to the control of the brain.
The complete collection
The quote database
Every quote we hold, 1549 of them from 213 people across 387 works. Filter it, sort it, and follow any citation back to the source.
1529 checked at source
Filter the collection
Category
Feeling
Attribution
2
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
3
Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.
4
There is a vast difference between working and being worked.
5
Resolve to remain as strong, as determined and as highly enthused during the darkest night of adversity as you are during the sunniest day of prosperity.
6
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticise others.
7
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
Epictetusdisputed·The Encheiridion, in A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus (trans. George Long)·1888
Attribution contested
The fifth maxim is the source of the modern slogan it is not what happens to you but how you react to it, which translates nothing Epictetus wrote and has no attested author. The paraphrase stops halfway. Epictetus opens by saying men are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, but he ends here -- taking the blame yourself is only the middle stage, and the finished man blames nobody at all.
8
No man can rob us of our Will--no man can lord it over that!
9
Human effort is not futile, but man fights against the giant forces of Nature in a spirit of humility.
10
Let us try this--every woman to work as though success depended on herself.
11
It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.
12
A man's troubles are always half disposed of, when he finds endurance his only remedy.
13
The optimist cannot fall back, cannot falter; for he knows his neighbor will be hindered by his failure to keep in line.
14
Whether one be fearful or fearless, foolish or wise, troubled or serene, within that soul lies the cause of its own state or states, and never without.
15
To grow in self-control, in patience, in equanimity, is to grow in strength and power; and you can only thus grow by focusing your consciousness upon a principle.
16
The man that stands upon a principle is the same calm, dauntless, self-possessed man under all circumstances.
17
Reverie is a loose dreaming into which a man falls; meditation is a strong, purposeful thinking into which a man rises.
18
Do not, I beg you, dread those things which the immortal gods apply to our minds like spurs: misfortune is virtue's opportunity.
19
Recollect all you have passed through, all that you have had strength to bear.
20
Discourse no more of what a good man should be; but be one.
21
If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free you must become so through your own effort, through your own initiative.
22
To me, a man has no master but God. Man in his authority is a sovereign lord.
23
Life’s not easy…don’t try and make it that way. It’s not fair, it never was, it isn’t now, it won’t ever be.
24
The man who labors without a definite purpose that is backed up by a definite plan for its attainment, resembles the ship that has lost its rudder.
25
True magnanimity consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.