30 Must Read Quotes From Icons Of History Required To Turn Your Adversity Into Advantage
By Ryan Holiday
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.
—PUBLIUS SYRUS
Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.
—EPICTETUS
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
—VIKTOR FRANKL
In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.
—EPICTETUS
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
—CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.
—SENECA
Then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
—SHAKESPEARE
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
He says the best way out is always through And I agree to that, or in so far
As I can see no way out but through.
—ROBERT FROST
What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better.
—WENDELL PHILLIPS
Under the comb
the tangle and the straight path are the same.
—HERACLITUS
Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble. (Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.)
—SIR HENRY ROYCE
The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out.
There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way
is an impasse.
—HERACLITUS
Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enmities.
—PLUTARCH
When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance revert at once
to yourself and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going
back to it.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged chance, conquered the chance, and made chance the servitor.
—E. H. CHAPIN
In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just
as she pleases.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
If thy faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.
—PROVERBS 24:10
Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens.
—ANCIENT INSCRIPTION AT THE ORACLE OF DELPHI
The Fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them.—CLEANTHES
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward,
not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.
—NIETZSCHE
“Gentleman, I am hardening on this enterprise. I repeat, I am now hardening towards this enterprise.”
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
A man’s job is to make the world a better to place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.
—LEROY PERCY
When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
—DR. JOHNSON
Live on in your blessings, your destiny’s been won. But ours calls us on from one ordeal to the next.
—VIRGIL
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school…it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
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