Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

Sincere repudiation requires sufficient comprehension of that which you repudiate to provide justification should your opposition face challenge or scrutiny.

Live one day in nobility, and you will have accomplished more than ten thousand lives of desperate, quarrelsome, hapless commoners.

Just about anything could go wrong. It is unwise and wasteful to conflate the merely possible with the probable—or the inevitable.

The only real failure is insufficient self-discipline or inadequate effort aimed at self-improvement.

Secondarily, you must resist the temptation to become frustrated with the stupid, the liars, and the corrupt. This is, perhaps, your greatest challenge. Let them degrade themselves, but do not degrade yourself because of them. Their character is their punishment. It is not your concern.

Focus on understanding the world around you, your place in it, and your duties as a rational and decent human being. The rest is theater. Leave it to the actors.

Spend neither time nor energy debating your detractors.

What answers directly to the exertion of your will? That, and only that, is your business. Do not invite needless distress and perturbation by insisting that the world must conform to your expectations or whims. Who, after all, do you think you are? Control the very small sphere that answers to your direction. As for the rest, cultivate gratitude f

A body that cannot obey the dictates of the will is nothing more than a corpse that has not yet expired.