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...

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

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,...

Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than...

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.

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...

I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough,...

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the...

Indeed this gentleman’s stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive...

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and...

Hour by hour resolve firmly to do what comes to hand with dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice. Allow your mind freedom from all other considerations. This you can do, if you will approach...

How does this prove it? What exactly is a proof, what is logical inference, what is contradiction, what is truth, what is falsehood?” Thus, the third field is necessary because of the second, and the...

Here is your great soul —the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe...

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I’ve had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to...

Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view.

If you want to make progress, put up with being perceived as ignorant or naive in worldly matters, don’t aspire to a reputation for sagacity. If you do impress others as somebody, don’t altogether believe...

For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast – a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the...

Warriors should suffer their pain silently.

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men’s badness, which is impossible.

You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he...

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

Fourteen years without a mother had me believe I could be stoic when I finally met her.

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...

What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

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...

If all emotions are common coin, then what is unique to the good man?To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of...

I’ve come to the point where I never feel the need to stop and evaluate whether or not I am happy. I’m just ‘being’, and without question, by default, it works.

Maximum remedium est irae mora.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies…

There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There’s a lot to learn from that generation...

I hear my silence talked of in every lane;The suppression of a cry is itself a cry of pain.

Just as the earth that bears the man who tills and digs it, to bear those who speak ill of them, is a quality of the highest respect.

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...

God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man...

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.

desire” in mind — I know none of this from my experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future — a broad future! — as upon a smooth sea: no desire ripples...

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope,...

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...

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

Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.

Il ne fait aucun doute pour moi que la sagesse est le but principal de la vie et c’est pourquoi je reviens toujours aux stoïciens. Ils ont atteint la sagesse, on ne peut donc plus...

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

From the philosopher Catulus, never to be dismissive of a friend’s accusation, even if it seems unreasonable, but to make every effort to restore the relationship to its normal condition.

She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.

He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward.” Jefferson Davis’s future wife describing...