The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

Just imagine how much less bearable and more painful an immortal life would be for mankind than the life I have given you. If you did not have death, you would curse me forever for depriving you of it. Indeed, I have deliberately mixed death with a little bitterness to prevent the advantages of it from causing you to embrace it too quickly or too rashly. To keep you in the moderate state that I wish, not fleeing either from life or from death, I have tempered each of those states with pleasure and with pain.

toward death than any other day did. The last step does not cause your fatigue; it reveals your fatigue.

and Nature has, it seems to me, made universal that which she made hardest to bear, so that the equality of our fate might console us for its cruelty.

Toward death, at different paces, moves the entire crowd that now squabbles in the forum,

The portion that is allowed to you beyond this, live out according to nature.

You are going to die at any minute,

We must make it our aim to have already lived long enough.

Take as much as Fortune gives, remembering that it comes with no guarantee. Snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you, and drain joy to the dregs without delay; nothing is promised for this night – nay, I have granted too long an extension! – not even for this hour. We must hurry, the enemy is right behind us!

Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 10.4

that the pursuit of a thing is more pleasing than the possession of it;

we talk to ourselves about our desires in ways that are constantly misleading.

avoid or outwit our irrationalities.

the things that people value highly and try hardest to get do them no good once they have them.

the illusion that fulfillment of a desire will bring us to a certain longed-for state of mind (which never quite arrives)

For his ailment is not poverty, but insatiability and avarice,

man never feels the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask for;

measure of what is necessary is what is useful.

The laws of Nature teach us what we legitimately need. The sages tell us that no one is poor according to Nature;

The philosopher Attalus used to say: “It is more pleasant to make a friend than to have one, as it is more pleasant to the artist to paint than to have painted.”

having a thing tends to bring about indifference or contempt towards it.

To obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless;

Anything loses its power to satisfy once it is possessed, not just because we see it more realistically but because possession itself changes how we feel about it.

That man will never be happy whom the sight of a happier man will torment.

For what will they do to us? What they can do, we don’t care about; what we care about, they cannot do.

that no man is pleased with his present state; which proves equally unsatisfactory, says

One can work to view the object of a desire accurately, and thus seek detachment from it;

one can perceive a desire as just another misjudgment and, if the talent for doing so has been developed, simply dismiss it.

Freedom is attained not by satisfying desires but by removing them.

Your bookkeeping is wrong. What you have paid out, you value highly; what you have received, low.

his guests were dismayed, but Pittacus said, “Every one of us has some trouble. He that has

Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them.

We feel a desire for more of whatever we have, and gradually value all sorts of things more highly than they are worth.

There is no difference, so far as contentment is concerned, between having something and not caring whether you have it. The second route often is easier.

Becoming alternately merchants and merchandise by turns, we ask not what a thing truly is, but what it costs.

We might define the disease this way: to strive too hard for things that are only worth wanting a little or not at all, or to value things highly that ought to be valued only somewhat or not at all.

The day a man becomes subject to pleasure, he will also be subject to pain.

Stoic idea that desires generally can be managed either by fulfilling them or decreasing them, and that the latter method is both overlooked and more effective in producing satisfaction.

And the converse is also true: desires are a form of poverty.

Your task is to give a good performance of the part that you are assigned. To select the part belongs to someone else.

Just as you are satisfied with how much substance has been allotted to you, be content also with the time.

Stoics regard wealth and other such externals as “indifferent,” not as good or bad in themselves.

But Stoicism allows that we might legitimately want some of those things – in other words, that some of them are so-called preferred indifferents.

The wise man will not despise himself no matter how short he may be, but nevertheless he will wish to be tall…. If his health is bad he will endure it, but he will wish for it to be good.

What is the difference between a preferred indifferent and the desires that Stoics regard as hazardous? Detachment.

There is only one way to achieve this:

by persuading yourself that you can live happily without them, and by regarding them as always about to depart.

He says those things are to be despised not in order that he not have them, but in order that he not worry about keeping them.

Let the thing wait for you, and give yourself some delay. Then think about two times to come: the time when you will enjoy the pleasure, and the time afterwards when, having enjoyed it, you will regret

it and reproach yourself. Compare this with how pleased you will be, and how you will congratulate yourself, if you don’t do it.

Remember that in life you ought to behave as you would at a banquet. Suppose something is passed around and is across from you.