“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
Bryan Magee, Popper. Psychology Press. p. 87. http://books.google.com/books?id=k9I9zY3wHRcC&pg=PA87.
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“We are not meant to be perfect.”
Bruce Lee, Be Water My Friend
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“The Usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness”
Bruce Lee, Be Water My Friend
Post; Be Water, My Friend
“In life, what can you ask for but to fulfil your potential and be real!”
Bruce Lee, Be Water My Friend
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“Know Thyself”
Apollo’s temple at Delphi
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“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world.”
Plato, The Republic
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“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”
Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
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“The response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains. This is loss aversion.”
Daniel Khaneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, P. 282-283
Post: What is Privilege
“He who knows he has enough is right.”
Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life
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“Know Thyself”
Maxim at Apollo’s Temple in Delphi
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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
Unknown, falsely attributed to Aristotle
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“Feedback is a present, you have to learn how to unwrap it.”
Unknown teacher
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“Relationship is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself – to be is to be related.”
Bruce Lee, Be Water, My Friend, Chapter 4
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“We strengthen our character through the habitual practice of sound moral habits, called ethical or human virtues.”
Alexander Havard, Virtuous Leadership
Post: Stoicism the Wrong Way: A Psychological Perspective
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, ch. 4
Post: Stoicism the Wrong Way: A Psychological Perspective
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
John Lennon, Song: Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), min: 2:19
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“…the determination was that friendship is said in three ways. For one of them is determined based on virtue, one on that of the useful, and one of the pleasant. Among these, the one based on the useful is that between most people, for they love each other because and insofar as they are useful, as the proverb has it: “Glaucus, an ally’s friends, so long he fight,” and “Athenians no longer acknowledge Megarians.” The friendship of the young is the one based on pleasure, for that is what they have perception of. Hence the friendship of the young is unstable, for as their characters change with their ages so does the pleasant. But the friendship based on virtue is that of the best men.”
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, Book VII, Chapter 2, 1236a30
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“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Frank Herbert, Dune
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“Philosophers do, perhaps, say what is contrary to common opinion, but not what is contrary to reason.”
Cleanthes, by Epictetus, The Discourses, Book 4.1, 173
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“He (Epictetus) does not have in mind the gods of conventional Greek and Roman religion, but rather the god of Stoic theory, who stands for the order and rationality that are inherent in the universe.”
Christopher Gill, Epictetus, The Discourses, Introduction, 11
Post: What is the Stoic God
“…the existence of gods involves the fact that he governs, or rather is, the cosmos, which explains why some of the proofs for the existence of god simply amount to proofs that the cosmos itself is a rationally ordered living being.”
Keimpe Algra, The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Stoic Theology, p. 160
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“Similarly, the Stoic sage is the equal of God, since God is nothing other than universal reason, producing in self-coherence all the events of the universe.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Stoicism of Epictetus
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Definition of Rejection: “the act of refusing to accept, use, or believe someone or something”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rejection
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“As researchers have dug deeper into the roots of rejection, they’ve found surprising evidence that the pain of being excluded is not so different from the pain of physical injury.”
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/rejection
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“I know that the ones who love us, will miss us.”
Keanu Reeves, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 2019
Post: Death and Stoicism: A Peaceful Acceptance
“‘My’ nature and the common Nature are not opposed, nor external to each other, for ‘my’ nature and ‘my’ reason are nothing other than an emanation from universal reason and universal nature, which are immanent in all things.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 4, p. 125
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Desire
“By means of the discipline of desire, we are to desire only that which is useful to the All constituted by the world, because that is what universal Reason wants.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 197
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Desire
“Desire and aversion presuppose passivity. They are reactions to appearances that the soul has not examined.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 5, p. 114
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Desire
“The discipline of Desire (orexis) and Aversion (ekklisis), i.e., of the ‘passions’, requires us to have desire for and attain the good, to have aversion towards and avoid the bad, and to view indifferent things with indifference.”
Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, p. 18
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Desire
“Marcus Aurelius emphasizes that these exercises are concerned with the present. In the case of the discipline of assent, they are concerned with our present representations. In the discipline of desire, these exercises are directed toward the present event; and in the discipline of active impulse what counts are our present actions.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 197
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Desire
“Assent is defined in intentional terms: it is that event in which one either accepts an impression as true or rejects it as false.”
Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chapter 1
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Assent
“An impression is what one might call a mere thought… What converts thought into belief is a further mental event which is termed variously ‘assent’ (synkatathesis), judgment (krisis), or ‘forming an opinion’ (doxazein).”
Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chapter 1
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“The discipline of assent appears as a constant effort to eliminate all the value-judgments which we bring to bear upon those things which do not depend upon us, and which therefore have no moral value.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 6, p. 169
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“’ Justice’ corresponds to the discipline of action, which makes us act in the service of the human community.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 201
Post” How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Action
“Justice corresponds to the discipline of action, which makes us act in the service of the human community.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 201
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Action
“The vice which is opposed to the discipline of action is thus frivolity (eikaiotes). It is the opposite to that seriousness or gravity with which all human actions should be accomplished. This human frivolity or lack of reflection does not know how to submit to the discipline of action; it is the agitation of a jumping jack, a puppet, or a top.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 273
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“What the Stoics mean by ‘appropriate actions’—appropriate, that is, to Nature—and ‘duties’ (kathekonta). They are actions, hence something which depends upon us; and they presuppose an intention, either good or evil.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 278
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Action
“With the appearance of reason in human beings, natural instinct becomes reflective choice. At this stage, we recognize rationally which things have ‘value’, since they correspond to the innate tendencies which nature has placed within us.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 277
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Action
“The Stoics take as their starting-point a fundamental animal instinct, which expresses the will of Nature. By virtue of a natural impulse which impels animals to love themselves and to accord preference to themselves, they tend to preserve themselves and to reject whatever threatens their integrity. It is in this way that what is ‘appropriate’ to nature is revealed to natural instinct.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 277
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“Most people, including philosophers, who, in their own view, are precisely not sages, must painfully orient themselves within the uncertainty of everyday life, making choices which seem to be justified reasonably—in other words, probabilistically.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 281
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Discipline of Action
“Marcus Aurelius knows that if one concentrates on the present, and circumscribes misfortunes at the moment when they occur, it will be easier to put up with them one instant at a time. The exercises of concentration on the present and of preparation for misfortune are thus intimately linked and mutually complementary.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 301
Post: How to Practice Premeditatio Malorum?
“For the Stoics, the key point is that the apparent or so-called ‘misfortunes’ being imagined are not actually negative at all, but completely indifferent. It’s fundamentally this indifference to feared ‘catastrophes’ that the Stoic seeks to strengthen, through prospective meditation involving exposure to them in mental imagery.”
Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, Chapter 7, p. 145
Post: How to Practice Premeditatio Malorum?
“We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 4, p. 67
Post: How to Practice Premeditatio Malorum?
“The true philosophers are always occupied in the practice of dying, and to them least of all men is death terrible.”
Plato, Phaedo, 64a
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“We must meditate ceaselessly on death, because this meditation radically changes our way of acting, of thinking, and of feeling.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Ch. 8, p. 203
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“From the moment we’re born we’re constantly dying, not only with each stage of life but also one day at a time.”
Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Chapter 1, p. 21
Post: How to Practice Memento Mori
“When we view things from the perspective of death, it is impossible to let a single one of life’s instants pass by lightly.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 203
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“The general principle which presides over the exercise of the delimitation of the self, was formulated by Epictetus, and placed by Arrian at the beginning of his Manual: the difference between the things that depend on us and the things that do not depend on us. In other words, it is the difference between inner causality, or our faculty of choice: our inner freedom, and external causality, that is to say, Destiny and the universal course of Nature.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 6, p. 173
Post: How to Practice the Dichotomy of Control
“The first step in the delimitation of the ego consists in recognizing that, of the being which I am, neither the body, nor the vital breath which animates it, is mine in the proper sense of the term.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 6, p. 173
Post: How to Practice the Dichotomy of Control
“There are things over which we have complete control, things over which we have no control at all, and things over which we have some but not complete control.”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 5, p. 89
Post: How to Practice the Dichotomy of Control
“The first result of this spiritual exercise of the view from above or cosmic flight of the soul is to reveal to people both the splendor of the universe and the splendor of the spirit.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, P. 254
Post: How to Practice the Stoic View From Above
“Another of its effects, however, is that it furnishes powerful instigations for practicing the discipline of desire. Human affairs, when seen from above, seem very tiny and puny; they are not worthy of being desired, nor does death appear as something to be feared.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, pp. 254–255
Post: How to Practice the Stoic View From Above
“This imaginative exercise of the view from above, which is also a view of things from the point of view of death. It is, moreover, a merciless view, which strips false values naked.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 7, p. 258
Post: How to Practice the Stoic View From Above
“The Stoics move between this [the divide-and-conquer strategy] perspective and one that modern scholars call the ‘view from above,’ which involves picturing your current situation from high above, as part of the whole life on Earth, or even the whole of time and space.”
Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Chapter 5, p. 175
Post: How to Practice the Stoic View From Above
“It’s defined as the quality that allows us to remain superior to and detached from anything that happens to us in life, whether judged ‘good’ or ‘evil’ by the majority.”
Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, Chapter 10, p. 213
Post: How to Practice the Stoic View From Above
“In Marcus Aurelius, but also in Epictetus and in Seneca, the vocabulary of the discipline of action includes a technical term meaning ‘to act with a reserve clause’ (Greek hupexhairesis; Latin exceptio), which implies the transcendence of intention with regard to its objects.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 283
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Reserve Clause
“Whoever has the firm, fixed moral intention to carry out a given action is like an archer aiming at a target (skopos). It does not depend entirely on him whether he hits the target or not; likewise, he can only wish for the goal with a reserve clause: namely, on the condition that Destiny also wills it.”
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, Chapter 8, p. 284
Post: How to Practice the Stoic Reserve Clause
“We will train both soul and body when we accustom ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, scarcity of food, hardness of bed, abstaining from pleasures, and enduring pains. Through these methods and others like them, the body is strengthened, becomes inured to suffering, and strong and fit for every task; the soul is strengthened as it is trained for courage by enduring hardships and trained for self-control by abstaining from pleasures.”
Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Sayings, Lecture 6.4–5
Post: How to Practice Stoic Voluntary Discomfort, What is Askesis?
“Let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological, or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, part II, The meaning of suffering
Post: How to Practice Stoic Voluntary Discomfort
“To engage in negative visualization is to contemplate the bad things that can happen to us. Seneca recommends an extension of this technique: Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. In particular, instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically ‘practice poverty’. We should, that is, content ourselves with ‘the scantiest and cheapest fare’ and with ‘coarse and rough dress.’”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 7, p.110
Post: How to Practice Stoic Voluntary Discomfort
“By undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort – by way, for example, choosing to be cold and hungry when we could be warm and well fed – we harden ourselves against misfortunes that might befall us in the future.”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 7, p.111
Post: How to Practice Stoic Voluntary Discomfort
“A person who periodically experiences minor discomforts will grow confident that he can withstand major discomforts as well, so the prospect of experiencing such discomforts at some future time will not, at present, be a source of anxiety for him.”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 7, p.111
Post: How to Practice Stoic Voluntary Discomfort
“A third benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort is that it helps us appreciate what we already have.”
William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Chapter 7, p.110
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