Discipline & Mastery

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion

The state will only ever be a half of itself.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.

Laozi Tao Te Ching

Away then with wisdom and knowledge, and great robbers will disappear!

Zhuangzi Zhuangzi

If, Mahāmati, meat is not eaten by anybody for any reason, there will be no destroyer of life.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka

If you are irritated by every rub,how will your mirror be polished?

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

These two essays probably will essentially be able to interest only theologians. (Preface)

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

Einstein, echoing Schopenhauer's exploration of free will in Zucker's 1945 translation, highlights humanity's ability to act on desires while lacking control over the desires themselves.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

I think the Ethics will have a permanent effect on me.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

In his campaigns I find more restraint and reflection than in those of Alexander, who seems to go looking for dangers and charging at them like a rushing torrent which indiscriminately batters and unselectively attacks anything it meets.

Michel de Montaigne Essais

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

Any fool can make a ruleAnd every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Any man that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. A Brave and Startling Truth.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

Faced with humanity's atomic predicament, Einstein, in 1946, wryly observed that political solutions proved far more challenging than the scientific mastery of physics itself.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions