Quotes from Antonia Macaro

Both Buddhism and Stoicism strongly encourage us to cultivate understanding and ethical action through spiritual practice. We may not share their precise views, but they certainly seem correct in their assessment that a good life requires more than positive feelings.

According to Seneca: 'Turning pale, shedding tears, the first stirrings of sexual arousal, a deep sigh, a suddenly sharpened glance, anything along these lines: whoever reckons them a clear token of passion and a sign of the mind's engagement is just mistaken and fails to understand that they're involuntary bodily movements.

Seneca says: 'if we are situated in the midst of a noisy city, let there be a preceptor at our side to contradict those who laud vast incomes and to praise instead the man who is wealthy on little and who measures wealth by how it is used.

The Buddha, for his part, talks about the 'eight worldly conditions' that 'keep the world turning around', and around which the world turns. 'What eight? Gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain'.

Mistaken about good and bad, unwittingly taken in by things that are ultimately harmful for us, we suffer from something akin to a perceptual illusion, only much deeper and more problematic. It's like the Müller-Lyer illusion: we can't help experiencing the lines as of different length, even if we know they're not.

Musonius Rufus writes that the soul is strengthened by first reminding ourselves of the right perspectives and then moulding our actions to this understanding, so that we stop pursuing things that are not truly good and stop avoiding things that only seem bad. In this way, we 'won't welcome pleasure and avoid pain … won't love living and fear death, and … in the case of money, [we] won't honor receiving over giving.

Epictetus has this to say about the role of habits: 'Generally then, if you want to make something a habit, practise it; and if you do not want to make it a habit, do not do it, but get in the habit of doing something else. It is the same in relation to things of the mind.

Marcus Aurelius writes: 'The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the colour of your thoughts.