From Moral Letters to Lucilius/Letter 59:

“The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken, he lives on a plane with the gods.  Now go, question yourself; if you are never downcast, if your mind is not harassed by my apprehension, through anticipation of what is to come, if day and night your soul keeps on its even and unswerving course, upright and content with itself, then you have attained to the greatest good that mortals can possess.  If, however, you seek pleasures of all kinds in all directions, you must know that you are as far short of wisdom as you are short of joy.  Joy is the goal which you desire to reach, but you are wandering from the path, if you expect to reach your goal while you are in the midst of riches and official titles, – in other words, if you seek joy in the midst of cares, these objects for which you strive so eagerly, as if they would give you happiness and pleasure, are merely causes of grief.”

 

Let the soul be roused from its sleep and be prodded, and let it be reminded that nature has prescribed very little for us. No man is born rich. Every man, when he first sees light, is commanded to be content with milk and rags. Such is our beginning, and yet kingdoms are all too small for us.

-Seneca, Letter 20

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”

-Mark Twain

“Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”

-Dale Carnegie

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

-Henry Miller

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Naturally we all struggle with free self expression, and we all want to do our best.  We would love the power to be ourselves on the world’s stage at all times.  Our great challenge is that in an unconditioned mind, fear is louder and more intense and immediate than our desire for self-mastery or for contribution to others.  Fear steals thunder from the more noble drive to ascend to our highest selves and make our greatest difference.  We are more alert to the sounds of dogs barking than angels singing.”

-Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto

“The reasonable man adapt himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

-George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

“If you listen to people, it’s really tough to actually be revolutionary…because the majority of people will take you back to the mean.”

-Peter Diamandis

Via The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, Episode 56 with the man himself.

“Man’s brain lives in the 20th century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age.  The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective.  They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. … modern man is still anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”

-Erich Fromm