Blog — Quotes

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

Not a dancer but a wrestler: waiting, poised, and dug in, for sudden assaults.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

Never complain, never explain.

Stoicism is about the domestication of emotions, not their elimination.

Ignoring what goes on in other people’s souls—no one ever came to grief that way. But if you won’t keep track of your own soul’s doing, how can you not be unhappy?

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny—it is the light that guides your way.

You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

The human soul degrades itself above all, when it does its best to become an abscess, a kind of detached growth on the world. To be disgruntled at anything that happens is a kind of secession from Nature, which comprises the nature of all things.

Remember: you shouldn't be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces. A good doctor isn't surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.

And why should we feel anger at the world?
As if the world would notice!

Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air, but vomited out and gulped in again every instant. Finally, the intelligence. Think of it this way: You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.

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

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out.

The best revenge is not to be like that.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also maddeningly difficult, particularly in a culture that prizes busyness over just about everything else.

But mindful isn’t the opposite of busy.

Mindfulness demands intention. Mindfulness is the practice of simply doing the work. Without commentary, without chatter, without fear.

The first step: Don't be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you'll be no one, nowhere—like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.