Best 232 quotes in «stoicism quotes» category

Maximum remedium est irae mora.

Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits, After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.

Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits

Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

Meditation betters not only the mind but also the brain.

Men are of little worth. Their brief lives last a single day. They cannot hold elusive pleasure fast; It melts away. All laurels wither; all illusions fade; Hopes have been phantoms, shade on air-built shade, since time began.

Most of us are “living the dream” living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.

Most people are like all stomachs: they cannot remain satisfied for a long time.

Most people have given back to life the power to make themselves happy.

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works. No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live.

Not even once has life or the weather complained about a human being.

Most people will leave you with the impression that the main function of our emotions is to cloud our judgement.

Oh, dear me!" he lamented. "The raft has floated off and I suppose it's gone down that awful hole by now." "Well, never mind. We're not on it," said Snufkin gaily. "What's a kettle here or there when you're out looking for a comet!

Nothing is burdensome if taken lightly, and nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.

Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: if we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for . . . all those are gone. So we need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.

Now this was possible only by a man determining himself entirely *rationally* according to concepts, not according to changing impressions and moods. But as only the maxims of our conduct, not the consequences or circumstances, are in our power, to be capable of always remaining consistent we must take as our object only the maxims, not the consequences and circumstances, and thus the doctrine of virtue is again introduced.” —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, p. 89

Optimism is an effort.

Our inability to imagine the length of the rest of existence magnifies our problems.

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Once you start learning from your problems, you stop wishing for a life without problems.

Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promises of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.

Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.

[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.

Pitying a living man for being poor is like envying a dead man for being rich.

[P]leasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.

Pretty much all wealthy people who were willing to lose and have lost their health while chasing wealth are now willing to lose their wealth while chasing health.

Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions.

Seek not for events to happen as you wish but rather wish for events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly.

Quamquam scripsit artem rhetorieam Cleanthes, Chrysippus etiam, sed sic, ut si quis obmutescere concupierit, nihil aliud legere debeat.

Regard [a friend] as loyal, and you will make him loyal.

Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.

Remember two things: i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have you cannot lose.

Running is a form of practiced stoicism. It means teaching your brain and body to be biochemically comfortable in a state of disrepair.

Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I'll show you a Stoic.

Saiba que um teto de palha abriga o homem tão bem quanto o de ouro.

[M]aking noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already. (Letter XVI)

Sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy.

Some of the best things that have ever happened to us wouldn’t have happened to us, if it weren’t for some of the worst things that have ever happened to us.

Some people avoid thinking deeply in public, only because they are afraid of coming across as suicidal.

Someone has to be stoic, for the sake of, in spite of, and in the face of all those who are, not. Someone, has to be serious. Someone has to choose to forgo choice, so that there is an option left for others to consider. Everyone can't be, someone.

Some things are made way more appealing than they are by our lack of them.

Sometimes we have no luxury of choice. We must do certain things for survival. That should not stop us from doing the things we love.

Soon, you will have forgotten everything. Soon, everybody will have forgotten you.

So the life of a philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god.

Stoical' is the best word to describe her reaction to these compliments, Emma putting up with them as of they were one of my unfortunate foibles.

Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.

Sine philosophia nemo intrepide potest vivere, nemo secure.

Stop wandering about! You aren't likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you've collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue-if you care for yourself at all-and do it while you can.

Submission, when it is submission to the truth — and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful — has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes is weeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah.