It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.
Themes
Mind
Opinion, judgment, and the inner citadel.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
Men are disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about events.
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Men in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for everyone can see, but few can feel.
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
Easy mind, light heart. A mind that is too easy hides a heart that is too heavy.