Seneca for instance advises “to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.”
~ Seneca / Courtesy Philosophersmag
Seneca for instance advises “to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.”
~ Seneca / Courtesy Philosophersmag
It is not the things themselves that disturb people but their judgements about those things
~ Epictetus / Courtesy Philosophersmag
A life can be good in Epicurean terms, even if it does not involve achievements validated and rewarded by mainstream society, or great sacrifices and struggles against worldly temptations.
Wilson, Catherine.
The Pleasure Principle: Epicureanism: A Philosophy for Modern Living (p. 250). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Both excessive ambition and excessive self-sacrifice, [The Epicurean] believes, distort human life. We should neither strive for pre-eminence nor be driven into or choose slavish self-abnegation.
Wilson, Catherine.
The Pleasure Principle: Epicureanism: A Philosophy for Modern Living (pp. 248-249). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
I feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. Unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
~ Plato
“Two elements must therefore be rooted out once for all — the fear of future suffering, and the recollection of past suffering; since the latter no longer concerns me, and the former concerns me not yet.”
(Letters to Lucilius, LXXVIII.14)
~ Seneca
“The most contemptuous form of revenge is not to deem one’s adversary worth taking vengeance upon.”
~ Seneca
“Wrongdoing has no harsher penalty than this: one offends oneself, and also one’s family and friends.”
~ Seneca
“He who chases two rabbits catches none.”
~ Confucius
“If you hate a person, you are defeated by them.”
~ Confucius
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
~ Confucius
“Your life is what your thoughts make it.”
~ Confucius
“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
~ Confucius
“The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
“Any man who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.”
~ Epicurus
“A man is as miserable as he thinks he is.”
~ Seneca
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.
~ William Blake
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different…”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“Other people’s mistakes? Leave them to their makers.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask?
~ Søren Kierkegaard
“It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing…”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
~
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
“Once you label me you negate me.”
“Leisure without study is death‚ a tomb for the living person.”
~ Seneca
Even if some obstacle comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.
~ Seneca
“Consider in silence whatever any one says: speech both conceals and reveals the inner soul of man.”
~ Cato
“I will admit that there are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens.”
~ Hannah Arendt, 1972
“To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”
~ Seneca
“If you want to escape the burdens that oppress you, you should not be somewhere else, but someone else.”
~ Seneca
“Excellence withers without an adversary.”
~ Seneca
“How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury.”
~ Seneca