Category: Stoicism
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Your Occasional Stoic –Let The God Within Direct You
In action be neither grudging, nor selfish, nor ill-advised, nor constrained. Do not let your thought be adorned with overwrought nicety. Don’t be a babbler or a busybody. Let the God within direct you as a manly being, as an elder, a statesman, a Roman, and a ruler, standing prepared like one who awaits the…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Do Not Waste What Remains of Life On What Others Think of You
Do not waste what remains of life on what others think of you, when it makes not for the common good. You are surely neglecting other work if you busy yourself with what others are doing and why, with what they are saying, thinking, or scheming. All such things do but divert you…
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Your Occasional Stoic — The Soul Is Intelligence and Deity, the Body Dust and Corruption
. Hippocrates, who had healed many diseases, himself fell sick, and died. The Chaldeans foretold the fatal hours of multitudes, and afterwards fate carried themselves away. Alexander, Pompey, and Gaius Caesar, who so often razed whole cities, and cut off in battle so many myriads of horse and foot, at last departed from this…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Scarce anything connected with Nature will fail to give him pleasure
Observe what grace and charm appear even in the accidents that accompany Nature’s work. Some parts of a loaf crack and burst in the baking; and this cracking, though in a manner contrary to the design of the baker, looks beautiful and invites the appetite. Figs, too, gape when at their ripest, and in ripe…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Understanding and intelligence often leave us before we die.
Man must consider, not only that each day part of his life is spent, and that less and less remains to him, but also that, even if he live longer, it is very uncertain whether his intelligence will suffice as heretofore for the understanding of his affairs, and for grasping that knowledge which aims at…
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Your Occasional Stoic –The Duration of Man’s Life is but an Instant
The duration of man’s life is but an instant; his substance is fleeting, his senses dull; the structure of his body corruptible; the soul but a vortex. We cannot reckon with fortune, or lay our account with fame. Put bluntly, the life of the body is but a river, and the life of the soul…
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Your Occasional Stoic –To Worry About Any Particular Event is to Revolt Against the General Law of Nature
Man’s soul dishonors itself, when it does all it can to become an growth, a tumor as it were on the Universe. To worry about any particular event is to revolt against the general law of Nature, which comprehends the order of all events whatsoever. Again it is dishonor for the soul when it has…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Beyond Opinion There is Nothing.
Beyond opinion there is nothing. The objections to this saying of Monimus the Cynic are obvious. But obvious also is the utility of what he said, if one accept his pleasantry as far as truth will warrant it. Mediations 2:15 Monimus, another slave turned philosopher, a cynic who was famous for “everything is vanity”. All…
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Your Occasional Stoic — The present Moment is the Same For All Men
Even if you were to live three thousand years or more remember that no man loses any other life than that which now lives, nor lives any other than that which he is now losing. The longest and the shortest lives come to one effect. The present moment is the same for all men, and…
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Your Occasional Stoic — Nothing is More Miserable Than to Range Over All Things
Nothing, says the poet, is more miserable than to range over all things, to spy into the depths of the earth, and search, by conjecture, into the souls of those around us, yet not to perceive that it is enough for a man to devote himself to that divinity which is within him, and to…
Milo and the Calf 