Human beings are a part of the whole, called by us “the universe,” a part limited
in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as
something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our own personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.