each of these names, if carefully considered, indicates the actions that are appropriate to it.

it is indeed pointless and foolish to seek to get from another what one can get from oneself.

a good guide, when he sees someone wandering astray, doesn’t abandon him with a dose of mockery or abuse, but leads him back to the proper path.

Practise, then, from the very beginning to say to every disagreeable impression, ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by these rules that you possess, and first and foremost by this one, whether the impression relates to those things that are within our power, or those that aren’t within our power

in the case of most faults, the main reason why people can be brought to confess to them is that they conceive them as being in some sense involuntary,

true education consists precisely in this, in learning to wish that everything should come about just as it does.

If someone reports to you that a certain person is speaking ill of you, don’t defend yourself against what has been said, but reply instead, ‘Ah yes, he was plainly unaware of all my other faults, or else those wouldn’t have been the only ones that he mentioned.’

principal duties. And what are those? [26] Fulfilling one’s role as a citizen, marrying, having children, honouring God, taking care of one’s parents, and, in a word, having our desires and aversions, and our motives to act and or not to act, as each of them ought to be, in accordance with our nature. And what is our nature? [27] To be people who

For in that case, one would have to say that tumours develop for the good of the body just because they do in fact develop, and, in a word, that to fall into error is natural just because almost all of us, or at least most of us, do fall into error.