In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

As a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation — that is, in the past or in the future.

We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.

To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives. It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are — neither good nor bad.

We let what we know limit what we can imagine; the result, a failure of imagination.

MAN’S ONLY LIMITATION, within reason, LIES IN HIS DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF HIS IMAGINA­TION. He has not yet reached the apex of development in the use of his imaginative faculty. He has merely discovered that he has an imagination, and has commenced to use it in a very elementary way.

Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine.

The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world.

Our imagination so magnifies the present, because we are continually thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity, and all this is so strongly rooted within us that all our reason cannot save us from it.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.

If reason tells you a pleasure is wholesome and harmless, you may enjoy it in moderation. But take care not to let your happiness gradually become dependent on it.