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Kindle Notes & Highlights
perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way.
All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect.
defining free will as a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable.
Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.
Socrates himself wrote nothing.
read attentively—not
unvarying reliability,
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful.
to care for all human beings is part of being human.
Don’t gussy up your thoughts.
No surplus words or unnecessary actions.
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.
everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist.
Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too.
do less, better.
speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculation and pretension.
the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.
our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.
No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculptor with wax. And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something else. Each existing only briefly.
External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them.
Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad.
You can’t complain about chance.
