to be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over

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

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.

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 cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out.
There are brambles in the path? Then go around them.
That's all you need to know. Nothing more. Don't demand to know "why such things exist." Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.
Of course, they have a place to dispose of these; nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it. So that it doesn't need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what's left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.

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

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.

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

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.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

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