Mary Tella

I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Those whose dispositions are yeilding, polite, and suave will be of even greater service, provided they do not flatter.
For excessive obsequiousness irritates bad-tempered men.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Since we know not how to endure an injury, let us take care not to receive one. We should live with the quietest and easiest tempered persons, not with anxious or with sullen ones. For our own habits are copied from those with whom we associate.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

You will not endure to be feared by a suspicious man, conquered by an obstinate one, or scorned by an ultra-refined one.
Choose straightforward, good-natured, steady people who will not provoke your wrath and bear with it.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Let our undertakings, therefore, be neither petty nor yet presumptuous and reckless. Let our hopes not range far from home. Let us attempt nothing which, if we succeed, will make us astonished at our success.

~ Seneca
Of Anger: Book 3 (45AD)

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Nothing, however will be of so much service as to consider first the hideousness and secondly the danger of anger. No passion bears a more troubled aspect. It befouls the fairest face, makes fierce the expression which before was peaceful.

~Seneca
Of Anger - Book 2 (45 AD)

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

The wrongs of the most powerful must not only be borne, but borne with a cheerful countenance. They will repeat the wrong if they think they have inflicted it.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

It will be advantages to furnish boys with even-tempered teachers. What is soft and informed clings to what is near and takes its shape. The habits of young men reproduce those of their nurses.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

~Seneca
Of Anger - Book 2 (45 AD)

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Yet often it is better to pretend not to have received an injury than to avenge it.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Always believe that something will occur to offend you.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death (1851)

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

If, in everyday life, you are asked about continued existence after death by one of those people who would like to know everything but refuse to learn anything, the most appropriate and approximately correct reply is: "After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

For this answer implies that it is preposterous to demand that a species of existence which had a beginning should not have an end; in addition, however it contains a hint that there may be two kinds of existence and, correspondingly, two kinds of nothingness.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

Virtue alone is lofty and sublime nor is anything great which is not at the same time tranquil.

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

What are we to say to the argument that if anger were a good thing it would attach itself to all the best men yet the most irascible of creatures are infants, old men and sick people, every weakling is naturally prone to complaint.

~ Seneca
Of Anger: Book 1

[Mary Tella @MaryTella2]

@AshleyAFrawley Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to prefer to spare it the burden of existence, or at least not wish to take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

~ Arthur Schopenhauer
On the Suffering of the World (1859)