Library, page 5

“The best revenge is not to become like the person who injured you.”

Marcus Aurelius · Stoicism

“Do every act of your life as though it were your last.”

Marcus Aurelius · Stoicism

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years.”

Marcus Aurelius · Stoicism

“Be like the headland against which the waves continually break.”

Marcus Aurelius · Stoicism

“A ruler who governs by moral example is like the pole star: it stays in its place and the other stars turn towards it.”

Confucius · Confucianism

“At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without going beyond what was right.”

Confucius · Confucianism

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

Confucius · Confucianism

“When I walk with two others, they can serve me as teachers. I pick out their good qualities and follow them, and their bad qualities and avoid them.”

Confucius · Confucianism

“Repay injury with uprightness, and repay kindness with kindness.”

Confucius · Confucianism

“When people all know beauty as beauty, ugliness comes into being.”

Laozi · Daoism

“The highest good is like water. Water benefits the ten thousand things and does not compete.”

Laozi · Daoism

“We shape clay into a vessel, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it useful.”

Laozi · Daoism

“Knowing others is intelligence. Knowing yourself is wisdom.”

Laozi · Daoism

“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is gained. In the pursuit of the Way, every day something is dropped.”

Laozi · Daoism

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”

Laozi · Daoism

“Nothing in the world is softer than water, and yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard.”

Laozi · Daoism

“Mind is the forerunner of states. They are mind-made.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify one's mind — this is the teaching of the Buddhas.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, death is suffering.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“A person struck by a poisoned arrow who will not let the arrow be drawn until every question about the archer is answered does not get what the teaching is for.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon rumour.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“Greater than one who conquers a thousand times a thousand people is the person who conquers themself.”

The Buddha · Buddhism

“All warfare is based on deception.”

Sunzi (Sun Tzu) · Military strategy

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”

Sunzi (Sun Tzu) · Military strategy

“Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought.”

Sunzi (Sun Tzu) · Military strategy

“Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.”

Heraclitus · Presocratic

“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.”

Epicurus · Epicureanism

“We are not born for ourselves alone; our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share.”

Cicero · Academic philosophy

“Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her into their homes.”

Cicero · Academic philosophy

“Scepticism is an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement and afterwards to tranquillity.”

Sextus Empiricus · Pyrrhonism

“The Sceptic's aim is tranquillity in matters of opinion and moderation of feeling in matters forced upon us.”

Sextus Empiricus · Pyrrhonism

“Suspension of judgement is a standstill of the intellect, owing to which we neither reject nor posit anything.”

Sextus Empiricus · Pyrrhonism

“What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill.”

Zhuangzi · Daoism

“You can't discuss the ocean with a well frog — he's limited by the space he lives in.”

Zhuangzi · Daoism

“No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others.”

Mencius · Confucianism

“All the ten thousand things are there in me. There is no greater joy for me than to find, on self-examination, that I am true to myself.”

Mencius · Confucianism

“Blue dye derives from the indigo plant, and yet it is bluer than the plant.”

Xunzi · Confucianism

“The course of Heaven is constant. It does not survive because of a Yao; it does not perish because of a Jie.”

Xunzi · Confucianism

“The heart is the ruler of the body and the master of spiritual intelligence.”

Xunzi · Confucianism

“Now if a man kills one person, he is judged unrighteous and must pay with his own life. If he kills ten people, he is ten times as unrighteous. Yet when it comes to the great unrighteousness of attacking a state, the gentlemen of the world do not condemn it but praise it, calling it righteous.”

Mozi · Mohism

“To accomplish anything, one must have standards. No one has ever accomplished anything without them.”

Mozi · Mohism

“The sage-kings of antiquity, in governing, honoured the worthy and employed the capable.”

Mozi · Mohism

“The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”

Heraclitus · Presocratic

“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.”

Epicurus · Epicureanism

“Friendship was given to us by nature as the handmaid of virtue, not as a comrade of vice.”

Cicero · Academic philosophy

“Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child.”

Mencius · Confucianism

“The gentleman says: Learning must never stop.”

Xunzi · Confucianism

“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”

Sunzi (Sun Tzu) · Military strategy

“Come now, I will tell you the only ways of inquiry that are to be thought of. The one, that it is and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the path of Persuasion, for she attends on Truth. The other, that it is not and that it is needful that it not be, that I declare to you is a path entirely unable to be learned.”

Parmenides · Eleatic

“For the same thing is for thinking and for being.”

Parmenides · Eleatic