It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.

Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculptor with wax. And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something else. Each existing only briefly. It does the container no harm to be put together, and none to be taken apart.

When the longest- and shortest-lived of us dies their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any of us can be deprived is the present, since this is all we own, and nobody can lose what is not theirs.

He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of our common nature through being displeased with the things that happen; for the same nature that produces these things has produced you, too:

You've seen that. Now look at this. Don't be disturbed. Uncomplicate yourself. Someone has done wrong … to himself. Something happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Life is short. That's all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.

It is no evil for things to undergo change, and no good for things to subsist in consequence of change. 43.

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.

Casting therefore all other things aside, keep thyself to these few, and remember withal that no man properly can be said to live more than that which is now present, which is but a moment of time. Whatsoever is besides either is already past, or uncertain.

The next, that all these things, which now thou seest, shall within a very little while be changed, and be no more: and ever call to mind, how many changes and alterations in the world thou thyself hast already been an eyewitness of in thy time. This world is mere change, and this life, opinion.