A Guide To The Good Life: The Ancient Art Of Stoic Joy Quotes
"Many people will have trouble naming this goal. They know what they want minute by minute or even decade by decade during their life, but they have never paused to consider their grand goal in living."
"Without a philosophy of life, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life."
"The obvious place to look for a philosopher of life is in the philosophy department of the local university."
"Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man."
"A modern would-be Stoic might consult the works of the ancient Stoics, but many of these works—in particular, those of the Greek Stoics—have been lost."
"The enlightened hedonist’s grand goal in living is to maximize the pleasure he experiences in the course of a lifetime."
"To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature."
"A Stoic sage is free from vanity; for he is indifferent to good or evil report."
"The primary ethical goal of the Greek Stoics was the attainment of virtue."
"Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy."
"Progress toward virtue is progress toward tranquility."
"Someone who is not tranquil might find it difficult to do what his reason tells him to do: His emotions will triumph over his intellect."
"The pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of tranquility are components of a virtuous circle."
"The Stoics thought it wouldn’t be obvious to their fellow Romans why they should pursue virtue."
"By sugarcoating virtue with tranquility, they made Stoic doctrines more attractive to ordinary Romans."
"Those who joined his so-called Eclectic school could gain the best that each of the competing schools had to offer."
"We should love all of our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever."
"He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand."
"The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have."
"One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process."
"Negative visualization is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation."
"To them, living as if each day were our last is simply an extension of the negative visualization technique."
"The regular practice of negative visualization has the effect of transforming Stoics into full-blown optimists."
"Catastrophes have the power to transform those who experience them."
"Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy."
"Saying grace—and offering any prayer of thanks—is a form of negative visualization."
"The key to a cheerful disposition is periodically to entertain negative thoughts."
"To refuse to take delight in the world is evidence of sophistication."
"What is really foolish is to spend your life in a state of self-induced dissatisfaction when satisfaction lies within your grasp."
"To be able to be satisfied with little is not a failing, it is a blessing."
"By practicing negative visualization, we can hope to gain what Seneca took to be a primary benefit of Stoicism, namely, 'a boundless joy that is firm and unalterable.'"
"Everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us."
"The only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts."
"A better strategy for getting what you want is to want only those things that are easy to obtain."
"If you refuse to enter contests that you are capable of losing, you will never lose a contest."
"We should, rather than wanting events to conform to our desires, make our desires conform to events."
"We must learn to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us."
"Pleasure has a dark side... the more pleasures a man captures, the more masters will he have to serve."
"There are some pleasures, the Stoics would argue, from which we should always abstain."
"Self-control will be an important trait to acquire."
"We must learn, as Marcus puts it, to 'resist the murmurs of the flesh.'"
"Willpower is like muscle power: The more they exercise their muscles, the stronger they get."
"Consciously abstaining from pleasure can itself be pleasant."
"To do our social duty, we must feel a concern for all mankind."
"What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things."
"By not responding to an insulter, we are showing him... that we simply don’t have time for the childish behavior of this person."
"The process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults."
"Nature requires from us some sorrow, while more than this is the result of vanity."
"It is the mind that makes us rich; this goes with us into exile, and in the wildest wilderness, having found there all that the body needs for its sustenance, it itself overflows in the enjoyment of its own goods."
"Life’s necessities are cheap and easily obtainable."
"It is better to die of hunger with distress and fear gone than to live upset in the midst of plenty."
"The man who adapts himself to his slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little sum, is the truly rich man."
"Laughter and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!"
"He that cleaves to wealth had better cast it away than allow his heart to be poisoned by it; but he who does not cleave to wealth, and possessing riches, uses them rightly, will be a blessing unto his fellows."
"Nothing must be husbanded more carefully than that of which there is such frequent need."
"To endure and even thrive in exile, a person must keep in mind that his happiness depends more on his values than on where he resides."
"Why experience anti-joy when you have it in your power to experience joy?"
"A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is."
"The best way to honor her memory is to leave off grieving and get on with life."
"To have whatsoever he wishes is in no man’s power, but it is in every man’s power not to wish for what he has not, but cheerfully to employ what comes to him."
"We should enjoy our affluence; it was the Cynics, not the Stoics, who advocated asceticism."
"We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people."
"The Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization. We should contemplate the impermanence of all things."
"If we live in accordance with Stoic principles, we will have the best life it is possible for a human to have."
"IF SOMEONE ASKED ME why Stoicism works, I would not tell a story about Zeus (or God). Instead, I would talk about evolutionary theory."
"Unlike Zeus (or God), evolutionary processes are indifferent to whether we flourish; they are concerned only that we survive and reproduce."
"Our ability to experience pleasure also has an evolutionary explanation."
"We have the abilities we do because possessing them enabled our evolutionary ancestors to survive and reproduce."
"Thanks to our reasoning ability, we have it in our power to 'misuse' our evolutionary inheritance."
"Evolutionary processes made us susceptible to suffering but also gave us—accidentally—a tool by which we can prevent much of this suffering."
"If our goal is not merely to survive and reproduce but to enjoy a tranquil existence, the pain associated with a loss of social status isn’t just useless, it is counterproductive."
"We must, in other words, use our reasoning ability to remove the emotional sting of insults and thereby make them less disruptive to our tranquility."
"What works for one person might not work for another whose personality and circumstances are different."
"Most people have personalities that fall somewhere between these two extremes."
"Since becoming a Stoic, my desires have changed dramatically: I no longer want many of the things I once took to be essential for proper living."
"Many of these individuals, one suspects, would be affluent rather than bankrupt—and far happier as well—if only they had developed their capacity to enjoy life’s simple pleasures."
"Why go out of their way to trigger a desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object."
"The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am."
"You might find yourself wishing that your Stoicism would be put to the test so you can see whether you in fact possess the skills at hardship management that you have worked to acquire."
"It was easy, I discovered, to find people in that age group who could serve as negative role models; my goal, I thought, should be to avoid ending up like them."
"At least you have the ability to speak," I would remind her. "In the first days after the stroke, you could only mumble. Back then, you couldn’t even move your right arm and consequently couldn’t feed yourself, but now you can. Really, you have lots to be thankful for."
"It has made me cognizant of yet another thing that I take utterly for granted: my ability to gulp down a big glass of cold water on a hot summer day."
"It is curious, but when I started experiencing these outbursts, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. Should I embrace my feelings of joy or hold them at arm’s length?"
"And I think the biggest mistake, the one made by a huge number of people, is to have no philosophy of life at all."
"The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing."
"Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not."
"He who laughs at the human race deserves better of it than he who mourns for it; for the former leaves it better hope of improvement."
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
"If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now."