The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

Material things are indifferent; how we use them is not. How then may a man maintain not only steadiness and calm, but also the state of mind that is careful and neither reckless nor negligent? He can act like people playing a board game. The game pieces are neither good nor bad, nor are the dice. How can I know what the next throw of the dice will be? But to use the throw carefully and skillfully, this belongs to me. In life, too, then, the principal task is this: to distinguish and separate things, and say: “Externals are outside my power: my choices are within my power. Where shall I seek the good and the bad? Within, in the things that are my own.” But in what depends on others, call nothing either good or bad, benefit or harm, or anything else of the kind. “What then? Does this