Quotes About Stoicism

To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps.

Let miseries come in millions of rivers and happiness in hundreds! I am no slave to misery! I am no slave to happiness!

It is a destiny of a woman to suffer in silence.

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside

So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he preferred to die than see Achilles sulking into inaction. Clearly, the epic poets understood invisible histories. Also later thinkers and poets had more elaborate methods for dealing with randomness, as we will see with stoicism.

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

As Ennius wrote, "The good is mostly in the absence of bad"; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one's external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won't affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.

Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

And, just as it is harder to have good qualities when one is rich than when one is poor, it is harder to be a Stoic when one is wealthy, powerful, and respected than when one is destitute, miserable, and lonely.

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop's fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A ESTRATÉGIA BARBELL DE SÊNECA Isso nos leva à solução

Who is this book written for?

Stoicism makes you desire the challenge of a calamity.

His eyes had a careworn coolness to them as if he had seen more than he should, and had stopped caring in order to save what was left of his soul.

Es el placer de asombrar y la satisfacción orgullosa de nunca asombrarse. Un dandi puede ser un hombre hastiado, tal vez un doliente; pero, en este último caso, sonreirá como el lacedemonio al morderlo el zorro. Se ve que, por ciertos lados, el dandismo linda con el espiritualismo y el estoicismo. Pero un dandi nunca puede ser un hombre vulgar.

La belleza característica del dandi consiste sobre todo en la frialdad que se dimana de la inquebrantable resolución de no conmoverse;

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard