Socrates
- "The unexamined life is not worth living."
- "I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."
- "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance."
Plato
- "Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
- "The greatest wealth is to live content with little."
- "Courage is knowing what not to fear."
Aristotle
- "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
- "Happiness depends upon ourselves."
Epicurus
- "Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not."
- "Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."
- "Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not."
Marcus Aurelius
- "You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
- "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
- "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
René Descartes
- "I think, therefore I am."
- "Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power."
- "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
Baruch Spinoza
- "Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
- "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
- "Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand."
Friedrich Nietzsche
- "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
- "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
- "Without music, life would be a mistake."
Søren Kierkegaard
- "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
- "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
- "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
Jean-Paul Sartre
- "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
- "Man is condemned to be free."
- "Life has no meaning a priori... it is up to you to give it a meaning."
