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I’ve was turned on to stoicism by Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss. Here’s their summary piece on the philosophy.
I’m coming to believe the key to happiness lies in perfecting your personal morals and structure of honor, as boring as that seems. Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues may be more convenient for brevity purposes, but the Stoics explain how to execute those virtues. Here are selected passages from Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Jump to his thoughts on reading and learning, work, wealth and poverty, fear, sickness, solitude, conformity, materialism, anger, friendship, death, vice and desire, character and spirit, or God.
“Be careful [with] this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable … To be everywhere is to be nowhere … [The same goes for] people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.”
“Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources … These people who never attain independence follow the views of their predecessors … A man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking.”
“To want to know more than sufficient is a form of intemperance … Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room. Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely open to her.”
“Rest is sometimes far from restful. Hence our need to be stimulated into general activity and kept occupied and busy with pursuits of right nature whenever we are victims of the sort of idleness that wearies itself … People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.”
“Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well … ‘A cheerful poverty … is an honorable state.’ What difference does it make how much there is laid away in a man’s safe … if he is always after what is another’s and only counts what he has yet to get, never what he has already?”
“We need 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. Misfortune may snatch you away from your country, or your country away from you, may banish you into some wilderness … So the spirit must be trained to a realization and an acceptance of its lot.”
“Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”
“There are three upsetting things about any illness: the fear of dying, the physical suffering and the interruption of our pleasures. I have said enough about the first … Nobody can be in acute pain and feel it for long. Nature in her unlimited kindness to us has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief … What in fact makes people who are morally unenlightened upset by the experience of physical distress is their failure to acquire the habit of contentment with the spirit. They have instead been preoccupied with the body … It is your body, not your mind as well, that is in the grip of ill health.”
“I am beginning to be my own friend … Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend to all.”
“[What is] particularly important to avoid[?] My answer is this: a mass crowd … Associating with people in large numbers is actually harmful: there is not one of them that will not make some vice or other attractive to us, or leave us carrying the imprint of it … When a mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority … an intimate who leads a pampered life gradually makes one soft and flabby; a wealthy neighbor provokes cravings in one; a companion with a malicious nature tends to rub off some of his rust even on someone of an innocent and open-hearted nature – what then do you imagine the effect on a person’s character is when the assault comes from the world at large? You must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.”
“If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.”
“Away with the world’s opinion of you – it’s always unsettled and divided.”
“Your food should appease your hunger, your drink quench your thirst, your clothing keep out the cold, your house be a protection against inclement weather … Spurn everything that is added on by way of decoration and display by unnecessary labor. Reflect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.”
“What fortune has made yours in not your own.”
“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 … A man is unhappy, though he reign the world over, if he does not consider himself supremely happy.”
“Set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing, and will ask yourself, ‘Is this what one used to dread?’ It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times … If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes … We shall be easier in our minds when rich if we have come to realize how far from burdensome it is to be poor … Start cultivating a relationship with poverty … For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.”
“‘Anger carried to excess begets madness’ … It is born of love as well as hate … The factor that counts is not the importance of the cause from which it springs but the kind of personality it lands in … The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.”
“The wise man … desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practicing friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle … Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear … This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined … If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship … To procure a friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity.”
“Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing to him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves.”
“Every day should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives … If God adds the morrow we should accept it joyfully. The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others. Whoever has said ‘I have lived’ receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning.”
“‘It is a very good thing to familiarize oneself with death’ … ‘Rehearse death.’ To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers. What are prisons, warders, bars to him? He has an open door. There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life. There is no need to cast this love out altogether, but it does need to be lessened somewhat so that, in the event of circumstances ever demanding this, nothing may stand in the way of our being prepared to do at once what we must do at some time or other.”
“At either end of [life] there is a deep tranquility … Death is all that was before us … I shall not be afraid when the last hour comes – I’m already prepared, not planning as much as a day ahead. The man whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die.”
“When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation … Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it.”
“A great thing is to die in a manner which is honorable, enlightened, and courageous … No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn’t you think a man an utter fool if he burst into tears because he didn’t live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding tears because he isn’t going to be alive a thousand years from now.”
“Someone will say ‘But I want to live because of all the worthy activities I’m engaged in. I’m performing life’s duties conscientiously and energetically and I’m reluctant to leave them undone.’ Come now, surely you know that dying is also one of life’s duties? … As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.”
“No one has power over us when death is within our own power.”
“Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop, for falsity has no point of termination … Whenever you want to know whether the desire aroused in you by something you are pursuing is natural or quite unseeing, ask yourself whether it is capable of coming to rest at any point; if after going a long way there is always something remaining farther away, be sure it is not something natural.
“Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear – they do one harm after they’re past and gone, not merely when they’re in prospect. Even when they’re over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal’s anxiety doesn’t end with the commission of the crime, even if it’s undetected at the time.”
“Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear … And there’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.”
“Drunkenness is nothing but a state of self-induced insanity. For imagine the drunken man’s behavior extended over several days: would you hesitate to think him out of his mind? … Drunkenness inflames and lays bare every vice, removing the reserve that acts as a check on impulses to wrong behavior. For people abstain from forbidden things far more often through feelings of inhibition when it comes to doing what is wrong than through any will to good … Add to this the drunkard’s ignorance of his situation, his indistinct, uncertain speech, his inability to walk straight, his unsteady eye and swimming head, with his very home in a spinning state of motion … Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments …”
“A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.”
“‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation’ … For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform … Be harsh with yourself at times.”
“No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own … Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be him – they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away … It is his spirit, and the perfection of reason in that spirit … And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature.”
“Greater power and greater value reside in that which creates (in this case God) than in the matter on which God works. Well, the place which in this universe is occupied by God is in man the place of the spirit. What matter is in the universe the body is in us. Let the worse, then, serve the better. Let us meet with bravery whatever may befall us. Let us never feel a shudder at the thought of being wounded or of being made a prisoner, or of poverty or persecution. What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end … for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.”
“Bravery is the [quality of character] which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom … Loyalty, the most sacred quality [,] never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of corruption … Self-control, the quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like but teh amount you ought to take. Humanity is the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious.”
“In each and every good man ‘A god (what god we are uncertain) dwells’ … And if you come across a man who is never alarmed by dangers, never affected by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, is it not likely that a feeling will find its way into you of veneration for him? … Into that body there has descended a divine power. The soul that is elevated and well regulated, that passes through any experience as if it counted for comparatively little, that smiles at all the things we fear or pray for, is impelled by a force that comes from heaven.”
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