Quotes About Stoicism

Knowledge of precepts and understanding appropriate action can help us to live ethically. But even more important is cultivating what could be called 'calm emotions'. For the Stoics, these were joy, wishing and caution. These are supposed to be a rational alternative to ordinary kinds of emotions: joy replaces pleasure, wishing replaces desire and caution replaces fear.

Where Epictetus advised testing the value of things by asking whether they are in our power, Chrysippus recommended the following two questions: Is there good or bad at hand? Is it appropriate to react? For a Stoic, the answer to the first question would be yes only if it refers to our virtue. Otherwise it would always be no, because nothing external to us is truly good or bad. It follows that the answer to the second question would also be no, it is not appropriate to react.

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.

Las escuelas filosóficas debatían básicamente dos cuestiones. En general, si el vino había sido otorgado a los humanos para enloquecerles o por su bien y, en particular, si –como afirmaban los estoicos– el sabio podía beber sin límite, hasta caer dormido, antes de verse llevado a alguna necedad

Para los estoicos, la forma más segura de encontrar la felicidad sería, por tanto, buscarla en lo único sobre lo que tenemos control: nuestro mundo interior. Todo lo que existe fuera de nosotros puede desaparecer, así que ¿cómo podemos confiarle nuestra felicidad futura y nuestro bienestar?

It is what it is and it's okay. I'll be okay, you'll be okay, and the world will keep turning.

One must not try to trick misfortune, but resign oneself to it with good grace.

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.

I'm enjoying the frenetic pace of this changing world and yet within that hanging on quietly but quite stoically to the same thing I've always done.

Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so delicate!

That passion is better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss

believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,—that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite

Suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to know 'rejoicing to heaven' must be prepared for 'grieving onto death' as well? And such might be the case! At least so the Stoics believed, who were consistent when they sought as little pleasure as possible, that life might afford them as little pain as possible.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary — but love it.

while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature according to the Stoa, and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism!

how well Stoicism hides what one does not possess!);

Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so sensitive! We are all of us pretty sturdy asses and she-asses.

Everyone dies. You needn't go on about it so.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

For this is the mark of a wise and upright man, not to rail against the gods in misfortune.

Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.

I wept not, so to stone within I grew.

The Stoics appear during a huge time of constant wars and real political strife. And it became very popular, I think, because it's a way of distancing yourself from strife and keeping your centre of gravity within you.