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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”
In his essay “On Anger,” he asserts, “No plague has cost the human race more.”
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
“what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”
view—“It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
“laughter, and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”
the anguish a person experiences after a death is motivated more by feelings of guilt than by grief.
Seneca provides several analogies3 to help us appreciate God’s motives in setting us back. God, he says, resembles a Roman head of household who “does not pamper a good man like a favorite slave; he puts him to the test, hardens him, and makes him ready for his service.”
“excellence withers without an adversary.”7
Thomas Jefferson wrote a document that has since become known as “Ten Rules for a Good Life.”
Jefferson was interested in anger management, the Stoics were interested in anger prevention.
In his essay “On Providence,” Seneca quotes the Cynic philosopher Demetrius as saying, “Nothing seems to me more unhappy than the man who has no experience of adversity.”
adversity as a kind of training exercise
and might even take delight in it, “just as brave soldiers delight in warfare.”
Michael Jordan, it was an adventure to step away from his career as one of the greatest basketball players in history in order to become, for a time, a minor-league baseball player.
would argue, from a cultural point of view, it’s more important to praise the people for the nine times they fail than for the one time they succeed.”
meta-delight—you might, that is, take delight in your ability to take delight in such things. Seneca was aware of this phenomenon: “Barley porridge, or a crust of barley bread, and water do not make a very cheerful diet, but nothing gives one keener pleasure than the ability to derive pleasure even from that.”6
last-time meditation, in which you acknowledge that because you are mortal, there will be a last time for everything you do. There will be a last time you flip a light switch, a last time you eat dinner, and a last time you say goodbye to your parents, spouse, children, and friends.
prospective retrospection. To employ this technique, you periodically pause, as you are going about your daily routine,
likelihood that at some point in the future, you will wish you could travel back in time to this very moment.
In doing prospective retrospection, you simply remind yourself that at the present moment, almost regardless of what you are doing, you are quite likely living in the dream world of your future self. Enjoy living that dream!
“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
should add that as long as your continued existence can help others, Stoics would regard it as cowardly to commit suicide.
“When Death Comes,” she expresses an outlook on death that resembles that of Canus. She tells us that when death comes—like “an iceberg between the shoulder blades”—she doesn’t want to realize, now that it is too late to do anything about it, that she has simply been a visitor in this world. She doesn’t want to end up sighing, frightened, or arguing. She wants instead to enter that “cottage of darkness” full of curiosity, knowing that she spent her life play ing the role of “a bride married to amazement.”
