Quotes About Stoicism

It's the age-old thing - it's such a cliche - but why worry about things you have no control over?

Why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice?

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

What can't be helped must be endured, Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining.

Both Stoicism and Epicureanism—. the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure—were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved;

Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?

The secret of peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower our desires to the level of our achievements. "If what you have seems insufficient to you," said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 A.D.), "then, though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself!

They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and it's essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer us - a stoical in the hedonism.

He always felt better when he could dole out pain alone.

That is perhaps the greatest insight that the ancient Roman Stoics championed for humanity. There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes. And our attitudes are up to us.

Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.

All the best gods are made of stone and say nothing.

it was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.

Wenn nun aber die Natur einmal korrupt ist, was soll man tun?" "Erstens es wissen, als ein Verhängnis und ohne etwas Positives daraus machen zu wollen. Zweitens ihr trotzdem folgen. Ergreifen, wovon man ergriffen ist.

He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he'd get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he'd just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts.

The philosopher Epictetus said more than two thousand years ago, "Man is not troubled by events but rather how he interprets them.

the art of life, mostly, the art of avoiding pain

Is not Christianity something altogether simpler than this? Have not all dogmas been successfully dissolved by literary tact? Is not religion just "morality touched with emotion," just precepts of good living, only "heightened and lit up by feeling"? Well, that Stoicism answered more or less to this description we have already seen; it was a system of morals that at times put on an emotional dress and masqueraded as a religion, and by stripping off this dress we lose no characteristic feature.

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.' 'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...' 'Life won't leave one alone as it is.

We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?

When during those first days he remembered that he would have to die, he said to himself: "Well, what of it? So much the better!