Classical & Philosophers

Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
Aesop (620 BC - 560 BC)

Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world.
Archimedes

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is the victory over self.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

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.
Marcus Aurelius

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius

Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.
Dandemis

I think, therefore I am.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Do not write so that you can be understood, write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
Epictetus

Nothing endures but change.
Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.
Horace

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Horace

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.
Kierkegaard

To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao-Tzu (570?-490? B.C.)

Know thyself.
Linnaeus

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Plato (427-347 B.C.)

Every person takes the limits for their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca (3 B.C. - 65 A.D.)

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
Sophocles

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ali ibn-Abi-Talib (602 AD - 661 AD), A Hundred Sayings

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.
Thucydides

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
Voltaire (1694-1778)

Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
Voltaire (1694-1778), on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)