Within ten days you will seem a god to those to whom you are now a beast and an ape, if you will return to your principles and the worship of reason.

To change your experience, change your opinion. If you're upset by something outside you, it's not the thing itself that upsets you, but your opinion of it. And it's in your power to wipe away that opinion immediately.

Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.

The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh—gentle and violent ones alike. Not mingling with them, but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place. When they make their way into your thoughts, through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it "good" or "bad.

Stoicism stressed the search for inner peace and ethical certainty despite the apparent chaos of the external world by emulating in one's personal conduct the underlying orderliness and lawfulness of nature.

things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

Your character is simply the sum of your thoughts over time.

Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don't let anything distract you. You've wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.

Continually, and, if possible, in the case of every mental image, consider its nature, realize its emotional content, and judge it rationally.

My mind. What is it? What am I making of it? What am I using it for? Is it empty of thought? Isolated and torn loose from those around it? Melted into flesh and blended with it, so that it shares its urges?

If worldly things "be but as a dream, the thought is not far off that there may be an awakening to what is real. When he speaks of death as a necessary change, and points out that nothing useful and profitable can be brought about without change, did he perhaps think of the change in a corn of wheat, which is not quickened except it die? Nature's marvellous power of recreating out of Corruption is surely not confined to bodily things.

Neither must he use himself to cut off actions only, but thoughts and imaginations also, that are unnecessary for so will unnecessary consequent actions the better be prevented and cut off.