The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

I shall continue to heap quotations from Epicurus upon you, so that all persons who swear by the words of another, and put a value upon the speaker and not upon the thing spoken, may understand that the best ideas are common property.

Those states are shown to be products of how we think and to mostly amount to mistakes; the judgments that lie behind them are found on inspection to be false or idiotic.

The mere fact that men endure the same pain more easily when they voluntarily undergo it for the sake of their country than when they suffer it for some lesser cause, shows that the intensity of the pain depends on the state of mind of the sufferer, not on its own intrinsic nature.

In the same way that studying is a torment to the lazy, so is abstinence from wine a torment to the drunkard, frugality a torment to the extravagant, and exercise a torment to the delicate and the idle; and so it is with all the rest. Things are not that difficult or painful in themselves. Our weakness and cowardice make them so.

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