Stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that's all even the gods can ask of you.
Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?
The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good.
He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best.
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
Accept favors from friends without losing your self-respect or appearing ungrateful.
Show intuitive sympathy for friends, tolerance to amateurs and sloppy thinkers.
Display expertise without pretension.
Not to be constantly correcting people, and in particular not to jump on them whenever they make an error of usage or a grammatical mistake or mispronounce something, but just answer their question or add another example, or debate the issue itself (not their phrasing), or make some other contribution to the discussion—and insert the right expression, unobtrusively.
To help others and be eager to share, not to be a pessimist, and never to doubt your friends' affection for you.
Doing your job without whining.
Self-control and resistance to distractions.
Generosity, charity, honesty.
Never exhibited rudeness, lost control of himself, or turned violent.
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.