Top 100 Quotes About Stoicism
#1. For death remembered should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life's but breath, to trust it error.
William Shakespeare
#2. A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#3. True affluence is not needing anything.
Gary Snyder
#4. If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.
Seneca.
#5. Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.
Neel Burton
#7. A Christian builds his fortitude on a better foundation than stoicism; he is pleased with every thing that happens, because he knows it could not happen unless it first pleased God, and that which pleases Him must be best.
Charles Caleb Colton
#8. Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
Marquis De Sade
#9. What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.
Seneca.
#10. The boon that could be given can be withdrawn.
Seneca.
#11. Stoicism was one of the new philosophical movements of the Hellenistic period.
Anonymous
#12. 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.
Marcus Aurelius
#13. Stoicism sure comes in handy when they take away your underpants.
Piper Kerman
#14. During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.
Maureen Corrigan
#15. We shouldn't be surprised if this kind of stoicism is of no interest whatsoever to the news, for it has sound commercial incentives for overemphasizing our vulnerability.
Alain De Botton
#16. So the life of a philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god.
Seneca.
#17. My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.
Koren Zailckas
#18. If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.
Seneca.
#19. 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.
Thiruvalluvar
#20. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren't, you'll self-destruct.
Blake Crouch
#21. It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze: sometimes we gain strength by driving in a carriage, by travel, by change of air, or by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine.
Seneca.
#22. All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within.
Seneca.
#23. Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#24. Sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy.
Epictetus
#25. 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 him at first meeting.
Shelby Foote
#26. Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.
Alessandro Pertini
#27. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
Seneca.
#28. It is a great man that can treat his earthenware as if it was silver, and a man who treats his silver as if it was earthenware is no less great.
Seneca.
#29. 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.
Mary Doria Russell
#30. Always resignation and acceptance. Always prudence and honour and duty. Elinor, where is your heart?
Jane Austen
#31. It was as if I'd lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be dine about it.
Justin Cronin
#32. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what is in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours.
Seneca.
#33. Warriors should suffer their pain silently.
Erin Hunter
#34. The peace of God is not the peace of stoicism or passivity. It is the most intense activity.
Oswald Chambers
#35. Regard [a friend] as loyal, and you will make him loyal.
Seneca.
#36. Nothing is burdensome if taken lightly, and nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.
Seneca.
#37. 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.
Tove Jansson
#38. In Tsurani culture, forgiveness was simply a less shameful form of weakness than capitulation.
Raymond E. Feist
#39. Nothing is more interesting than repressed emotion. The appearance of sardonic coldness and stoicism which has deceived you is but a hollow mockery; beneath it I secrete a maelstrom of impassioned feeling and a mausoleum of blighted hopes.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#40. What would Heracles have been if he had said, "How am I to prevent a big lion from appearing, or a big boar, or brutal men?" What care you, I say? If a big boar appears, you will have a greater struggle to engage in; if evil men appear, you will free the world from evil men.
Epictetus
#41. Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.
Bergen Evans
#42. B.C.) - Stoicism stressed the search for inner peace and ethical certainty despite the apparent chaos of the external world by emulating in one's personal conduct the underlying orderliness and lawfulness of nature.
Marcus Aurelius
#43. Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.
Randy Pausch
#44. If you have assumed any character beyond your strength, you have both demeaned yourself ill in that and quitted one which you might have supported.
Epictetus
#45. 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 in respect of any that happen to befall himself.
Charles Dickens
#46. It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body; for it is better to die than to live badly.
Epictetus
#47. 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 and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Seneca.
#48. No one is ever unhappy because of someone else.
Epictetus
#49. Oh, dear me!" he lamented. "The raft has floated off and I suppose it's gone down that awful hole by now."
"Well, never mind. We're not on it," said Snufkin gaily. "What's a kettle here or there when you're out looking for a comet!
Tove Jansson
#50. Believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, - that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. I hear my silence talked of in every lane;
The suppression of a cry is itself a cry of pain.
Darshan Singh
#53. The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Colin Wilson
#54. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism - . the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure - were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved;
Will Durant
#55. 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 ...
Joseph McCabe
#56. Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.
Thomas Hardy
#57. Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#58. ...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...
William B. Irvine
#59. I think it's safe to say that 'manliness' was a common theme in my upbringing. It was an assumed status, but - and here's the important bit - it was the Rudyard Kipling kind. The emphasis was on gentlemanly conduct, sportsmanship, fairness and stoicism.
Ian Watson
#60. The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them.
Edith Hamilton
#61. The basic philosophy of stoicism is that you have nothing real external to your own consciousness, that the only thing real is in fact your consciousness.
Roger Avary
#62. Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.
Seneca.
#63. So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#64. Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.
Nora Roberts
#66. Fourteen years without a mother had me believe I could be stoic when I finally met her.
Maria V. Snyder
#67. Stoicism is the only bridge by which [greatness] can be achieved.
David Sun
#68. Seek not for events to happen as you wish but rather wish for events to happen as they do and your life will go smoothly.
Epictetus
#69. One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry. Another
Massimo Pigliucci
#70. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Seneca.
#71. She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.
Candice Millard
#73. When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.
Marcus Aurelius
#74. There was an awkwardness to him, a stoicism that most people, with their need for appearances and fake smiles, found off-putting. Shane couldn't handle small talk or the excess bullshittery of modern society. When
Harlan Coben
#76. 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.
Seneca.
#77. In the Reformed tradition, a good deal of our stoicism and apathy rides like a parasite on the back of the doctrine of God's sovereignty and providence.
Toby J. Sumpter
#78. You should ... live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.
Seneca.
#79. When you give your items away, don't keep the excess of your pride.
Bremer Acosta
#80. I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.
Nicole Krauss
#81. 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.
Marcus Aurelius
#82. Psychopaths, skillful as they are at manipulating others, have trouble with emotional regulation and generally screw up at either extreme: theatrical histrionics or cold stoicism.
Jonathan Kellerman
#83. Most of us are "living the dream" living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.
William B. Irvine
#84. He liked the English and their peculiarities. He liked their stoicism under pressure; on the wall in his factory he kept a copy of a war poster emblazoned with the Crown of King George and underneath the words Keep Calm and Carry On.
Natasha Solomons
#86. Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.
Emil M. Cioran
#87. How many times could a mother's heart break? An infinite number of times. Each time her children were hurt. She'd long ago accepted the pain of it, as well as the stoicism to never let it show. It was a mother's lot in life.
Lorraine Heath
#88. For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.
Epictetus
#89. The stoicism that comes of endurance has something of death in it.
Mary Catherwood
#90. What's the good of being stoical if nobody notices?
Mason Cooley
#91. The philosopher's lecture room is a 'hospital': you ought not to walk out of it in a state of pleasure, but in pain; for you are not in good condition when you arrive.
Epictetus
#92. 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 begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.
Harry Houdini
#93. Stoical' is the best word to describe her reaction to these compliments, Emma putting up with them as of they were one of my unfortunate foibles.
Carol Lee
#94. Stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.
Audre Lorde
#95. 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.
Seneca.
#96. Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions.
Bremer Acosta
#97. Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.
Markus Zusak
#98. Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.
Epictetus
#99. There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#100. People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?
Alice Hoffman
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