Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.

Recommended reading: Meditations.

A paradox of life: The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.

Recommended reading: The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life – Master Any Skill or Challenge by Learning to Love the Process.

Mental confusion is a veil that prevents us from seeing reality clearly and clouds our understanding of the true nature of things. Practically speaking, it is also the inability to identify the behaviour that would allow us to find happiness and avoid suffering. When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it.

Recommended reading: How to Solve Our Human Problems: The Four Noble Truths.

Human beings can change, and if someone has truly changed, forgiveness is not indulgence toward his past deeds but an acknowledgement of what he has become. Forgiveness is intimately linked to the possibility of human transformation.

Recommended reading: Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.

There is no way to peace, peace is the way. There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. There is no way to love, love is the way.

Recommended reading: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives.

Behold the world fresh – as it is, on its own terms – through the eyes of a beginner.

Recommended reading: Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness.

It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers to why you haven’t created the life and results you want, for it is you who creates the quality of the life you lead and the results you produce. You – no one else! To achieve major success in life – to achieve those things that are most important to you – you must assume 100% responsibility for your life. Nothing less will do.

Recommended reading: The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

True happiness is a verb. It’s the ongoing dynamic performance of worthy deeds. The flourishing life, whose foundation is virtuous intention, is something we continually improvise, and in doing so our souls mature. Our life has usefulness to ourselves and to the people we touch.

Recommended reading: Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness.

When the soul cries out, it is a sign that we have arrived at a necessary, mature stage of self-reflection. The secret is not to get stuck there dithering or wringing your hands, but to move forward by resolving to heal yourself. Philosophy asks us to move into courage. Its remedy is the unblinking excavation of the faulty and specious premises on which we base our lives and our personal identity. Philosophy’s purpose is to illuminate the ways our soul has been infected by unsound beliefs, untrained tumultuous desires, and dubious life choices and preferences that are unworthy of us. Self-scrutiny applied with kindness is the main antidote.

Recommended reading: Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness.

Be generous in prosperity and thankful in adversity, Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.

Recommend reading: The Hidden Words.