The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable – not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For why are we thrown into a rage by somebody’s cough or sneeze, by negligence in chasing a fly away, by a dog that gets in the way, or by the dropping of a key that has slipped from the hands of a careless servant? Seneca, On Anger 2.25.3

You will learn the truth by experience: the things that people value highly and try hardest to get do them no good once they have them. Those who don’t have them imagine that, once they do, everything good will be theirs; then they do get them, and the heat of their desires is the same, their agitation is the same, their disgust with what they possess is the same, and their wish for what they don’t have is the same. Epictetus, Discourses 4.1.174

A man never feels the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask for; he is just as happy without them; whilst another, who may have a hundred times as much, feels miserable because he has not got the one thing he wants. Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

The desires of man increase with his acquisitions; every step which he advances brings something within his view, which he did not see before, and which, as soon as he sees it, he begins to want. Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites. Johnson, The Idler no. 30 (1758)

The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment. Johnson, The Rambler no. 71 (1750)

No man when he views the lot of others is content with his own. This is why we grow angry even at the gods, because some person is ahead of us, forgetting how many men there are behind us, and how huge a mass of envy follows at the back of him who envies but a few. Nevertheless such is the presumptuousness of men that, although they may have received much, they count it an injury that they might have received more. Seneca, On Anger 3.31.1

When we are invited to a banquet, we take what is put before us. If someone should order the host to serve him fish or pastries, he would seem eccentric. But out in the world, we ask the gods for things they do not give us – even though there are many things they have given us. Epictetus, Fragment (Stobæus 3.4.91)