A Quote by Xenocrates

Happiness is the possession of the excellence proper to us, and of the power subservient to it.

Xenocrates

Quote Topics

Excellence Happiness Possession Power Proper Subservient Us

Quote Author

Xenocrates
Greek - Philosopher
396 BC - 314 BC

A birth we embark on a good journey, seeking a destination of happiness. The journeys on our life-road facilitate development of our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual states-of-being, into a way of true power and wisdom. The Heart-center power, expressed as happiness and love, will guide us upward on a path away from frustration, bitter toil and travail. These journeys are directed inward, not outwardly in material mementos of ego and possession. The lesson is relearning that which has been suppressed and forgotten, in ourselves, since our earliest childhood.

R. Carlos Nakai

We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. ...God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth.

William Ellery Channing

True happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of external goods.

Aristotle

Life is indeed either a rich possession or a poor, according as it is made subservient to noble aims or ignoble pleasures.

Christian Nestell Bovee

I would define the proper use of power as something that creates happiness for yourself and others.

Frederick Lenz

Now the goodness that we have to consider is clearly human goodness, since the good or happiness which we set out to seek was human good and human happiness. But human goodness means in our view excellence of soul, not excellence of body.

Aristotle

The power for happiness, for good, for everything we need of life is within each one of us. The power is there - unlimited power.

Robert Collier

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

Edmund Burke

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

Aristotle

Every man judges his own happiness and satisfaction with life in terms of his possession or lack of possession of those things that he considers worthwhile and valuable.

Meir Kahane

In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure... Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all mens happiness.

Charlie Chaplin

There is a family of us who have this yearning for a kind of excellence that we can manifest every day of our lives, a family who wants to believe we're not pawns, we're not victims on this planet, that knows we have the power within us here and now to change the world we see around us!

Richard Bach

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.