45 quotations for my birthday

22 December 2025

I turn a decidedly middle-aged number today, and so to celebrate I'm going to share some of my favourite quotations. They're in no particular order. You might see multiple examples from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence by Baltasar Gracián, both of which I tend to read (slowly) on repeat.

If you compare them with one another, you will find that some disagree or are in conflict. That's to be expected: we contain multitudes, and need one type of advice in one situation, and a different type in another.

“It may be that the things you fret and fume to pursue or avoid do not come to you, but rather you go to them. Let your judgements of them, then, remain in suppression; they for their part will make no move, and so you will not be seen pursuing or avoiding them.” (Marcus Aurelius)
“It is not certain that everything is uncertain.” (Blaise Pascal)
“Things in our life simply don’t go according to set decisions. One glides into a new epoch, and the so‑called ‘decision’ is as a rule only the final summing‑up of items looking fine entered into the ledger by life itself.” (Franz Rozenweig)
“Although the world is full of fools, nobody thinks, or even suspects, that they are one.” (Baltasar Gracián)
“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” (Epictetus)
“I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like butter and sugar, not even at Cambridge.” (Virginia Woolf)
“The most universal quality is diversity.” (Michel de Montaigne)
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it.” (Karl Marx)
“Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man’s habits change quickly enough?” (Isaac Asimov)
“‘The individual’ is an idea like other ideas.” (Harold Rosenberg)
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (Oscar Wilde)
“Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled.” (Goncourt Brothers)
“The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.” (Pema Chödrön)
“Undertake what’s easy as if it were hard, and what’s hard as if it were easy. In the first case, so that confidence doesn’t make you careless; in the second, so that lack of confidence doesn’t make you discouraged.” (Baltasar Gracián)
“You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.” (Richard Feynman)
“The tools we use inform the marks we make.” (Brad Bartlett)
“To expect bad men never to do bad things is insensate; it is hoping for the impossible. To tolerate their offences against others, and expect none against yourself, is both irrational and arbitrary.” (Marcus Aurelius)
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” (Carl Jung)
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” (Hannah Arendt)
“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” (John Stuart Mill)
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk… every day I walk myself into a state of well‑being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” (Søren Kierkegaard)
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” (Buckminster Fuller)
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.” (Octavia E. Butler)
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible.” (Frank Zappa)
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. You can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” (Steve Jobs)
“To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.” (Ursula Le Guin)
“It may be wiser to try to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.” (Frank Bures)
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” (Carl Jung)
“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” (Miles Davis)
“Everything we come into contact with has the potential to influence our taste. So the art of living well includes the art of feeding your input stream.” (Rick Rubin)
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” (W. B. Yeats)
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” (Anaïs Nin)
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I am saying? Does it feel this way to you?” (Kazuo Ishiguro)
“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realise it is play.” (Alan Watts)
“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say… What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing…the thing that might be worth saying.” (Gilles Deleuze)
“The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over – and the longer it takes to bring the mind to stop in the presence of anything.” (Wendell Berry)
“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” (Emily Dickinson)
“Integrity has no need of rules.” (Albert Camus)
“During my eighty‑seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” (Bernard M. Baruch)
“Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vague experience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whatever clearness is afterwards attained.” (George Santayana)
“If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy.” (Michael Frayn)
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping‑stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” (Anne Lamott)
“Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional.” (Roger Crawford)
“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” (Epictetus)