Best 232 quotes in «stoicism quotes» category

We all have problems. Or rather, everyone has at least one thing that they regard as a problem.

We always have a choice as to, not what we hear, but what we listen to.

We are generally pleased the most by compliments that are insincere.

We are more in control of how much we know than we are of how much we have.

We can always choose not what we see but how we look at what we see.

[W]e can have the things we need for our ordinary purposes if we will only be content with what the earth has made available on its surface.

We have never tried to do most of the things we are dead sure we cannot do.

We have control over when, how, and where to plant a seed, not over what it will become.

We lose a significant portion of our lives attending ceremonies for people who have lost theirs.

We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.

We must become friends of despair if we are to be drawn above it to genuine and heartfelt hope. Far from being an exercise in morbidity or arrogance, a deepening acquaintance with our death and with the vanity of human wishes is our worldly hearts a needed path to perfect health (61).

We need not reply or even listen to people who are talking about—not to—us.

We often do not, not because we cannot, but because we think so.

We're never unhappy until we remember why we're supposed to be unhappy.

We should not use philosophy like a herbal remedy, to be discarded when we're through. Rather, we must allow philosophy to remain with us, continually guarding our judgements throughout life, forming part of our daily regimen, like eating a nutritious diet or taking phisical exercise.

What are virtues, if not practiced evenly in both times of joy and in hardships?

[W]hat cause can there be for complaint, after all, in anything that was always bound to come to an end fading gradually away? What is troubling about that? [...] Moving to one's end through nature's own gentle process of dissolution - is there a better way of leaving life than that? Not because there is anything wrong with a sudden, violent departure, but because this gradual withdrawal is an easy route.

Whatever happens, happens such as you are either formed by nature able to bear it, or not able to bear it. If such as you are by nature form’d able to bear, bear it and fret not: But if such as you are not naturally able to bear, don’t fret; for when it has consum’d you, itself will perish. Remember, however, you are by nature form’d able to bear whatever it is in the power of your own opinion to make supportable or tolerable, according as you conceive it advantageous, or your duty, to do so.

What fortune has made yours is not your own.

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

What

What would Heracles have been if he had said, "How am I to prevent a big lion from appearing, or a big boar, or brutal men?" What care you, I say? If a big boar appears, you will have a greater struggle to engage in; if evil men appear, you will free the world from evil men.

When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity for formulate with certainty.

When pain comes, it must not derail you from your set virtues. If it does, you have failed to practice your virtues by going with the hype of pain.

You can be hurt, not by what others think of you, but by what you think of what they think or you think they think of you.

You cannot be blessed with the ability to be happy without being cursed with the ability to be unhappy.

...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...

When you are disturbed by events and lose your serenity, quickly return to yourself and don't stay upset longer than the experience lasts; for you'll have more mastery over your inner harmony by continually returning to it.

When you give your items away, don’t keep the excess of your pride.

When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible? No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.

Where you arrive does not matter as much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.

Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you've outdone your own self? Set yourself a limit which you couldn't even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them. If there were anything substantial in them they would sooner or later bring a sense of fullness; as it is they simply aggravate the thirst of those who swallow them.

Within, the only place where it is created, is the very last place most pursuers of happiness are likely to go.

You cannot attain everlasting peace of mind unless you stop seeing your mind as yourself and start seeing yourself as your mind’s guardian.

You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, "What are your thinking about?" you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that.

You should, I need hardly say, live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.

You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.

Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.

[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

40. The gods either have power or they have not. If they have not, why pray to them? If they have, then instead of praying to be granted or spared such-and-such a thing, why not rather pray to be delivered from dreading it, or lusting for it, or grieving over it? Clearly, if they can help a man at all, they can help him in this way. You will say, perhaps, ‘But all that is something they have put in my own power.’ Then surely it were better to use your power and be a free man, than to hanker like a slave and a beggar for something that is not in your power. Besides, who told you the gods never lend their aid even towards things that do lie in our own power? Begin praying in this way, and you will see. Where another man prays ‘Grant that I may possess this woman,’ let your own prayer be, ‘Grant that I may not lust to possess her.’ Where he prays, ‘Grant me to be rid of such-and-such a one,’ you pray, ‘Take from me my desire to be rid of him.’ Where he begs, ‘Spare me the loss of my precious child,’ beg rather to be delivered from the terror of losing him. In short, give your petitions a turn in this direction, and see what comes.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

Hillary Clinton appears to believe in a form of stoicism - which is a tried and true life philosophy.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

A blind man’s thoughts almost never have anything to do with the things he is facing.

A fool is a man who disregards legacy.

After failure, it is possible to keep going– and to fail better.

All Hellenistic schools seem to define [wisdom] in approximately the same terms: first and foremost, as a state of perfect peace of mind. From this viewpoint, philosophy appears as a remedy for human worries, anguish, and misery brought about, for the Cynics, by social constraints and conventions; for the Epicureans, by the quest for false pleasures; for the Stoics, by the pursuit of pleasure and egoistic self-interest; and for the Skeptics, by false opinions. Whether or not they laid claim to the Socratic heritage, all Hellenistic philosophers agreed with Socrates that human beings are plunged in misery, anguish, and evil because they exist in ignorance. Evil is to be found not within things, but in the value judgments with people bring to bear upon things. People can therefore be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgments, and in this sense all these philosophies wanted to be therapeutic.

All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within.

A man whose mind has completely left childhood behind would not be surprised if he were to walk in on his wife having sex with her father … or with his mother.