Best 232 quotes in «stoicism quotes» category

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.

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 attain everlasting peace of mind unless you stop seeing your mind as yourself and start seeing yourself as your mind’s guardian.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it.

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.

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

An action is at least a billion times less difficult to choose than a reaction.

And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.

And here are two of the most immediately useful thoughts you will dip into. First that things cannot touch the mind: they are external and inert; anxieties can only come from your internal judgement. Second, hat all these things you see will change almost as you look at them, and then will be no more. Constantly bring to mind all that you yourself have already seen changed. The universe is change: life is judgement.

And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.

A properly educated leader, especially when harassed and under pressure, will know from his study of history and the classics that circumstances very much like those he is encountering have occurred from time to time on this earth since the beginning of history. He will avoid the self-indulgent error of seeing himself in a predicament so unprecedented, so unique, as to justify his making an exception to law, custom or morality in favor of himself. The making of such exceptions has been the theme of public life throughout much of our lifetimes. For twenty years, we've been surrounded by gamesmen unable to cope with the wisdom of the ages. They make exceptions to law and custom in favor of themselves because they choose to view ordinary dilemmas as unprecedented crises.

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

As things are, there is about wisdom a nobility and magnificence in the fact that she didn't just fall to a person's lot, that each man owes her to his own efforts, that one doesn't go to anyone other than oneself to find her.

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.

At any given moment, it is a beautiful day in many parts of the world.

Ambition: The willingness to continually question and assess one’s acceptance and contentment with their place in life; conjunct with the willingness to take action should a resolvable discrepancy between one’s values and one’s current standing, present itself. By extension, an ambitious person is someone who has to the best of their abilities thoughtfully defined their values and continues on to do whatever is reasonably possible to fully embrace who they are in life.

But Moominmamma was quite unperturbed. "Well, well!" she said, "it seems to me that our guests are having a very good time." "I hope so," replied Moominpappa. "Pass me a banana, please dear.

Being a stoic does not mean being a robot. Being a stoic means remaining calm both at the height of pleasure and the depths of misery.

Change: nothing inherently bad in the process, nothing inherently good in the result.

Being in a hurry does not slow down time.

Christianity is not a therapy for those who wish never to be upset (177).

[C]ling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full not of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do.

Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.

Destroying the seeds of disappointment requires you to unexpect the expected.

Detente particularmente en cada una de las acciones que haces y pregúntate si la muerte es terrible porque te priva de eso.

Disgraceful if, in this life where your body does not fail, your soul should fail you first.

Disturbance comes only from within- from our own perceptions. Everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist

During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.

Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.

Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.

Enlightenment does not mean making the most of bad situations. It means knowing that every situation is neither good nor bad.