The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

Your attitude might resemble that of a doctor – a very good one, let’s say – who has had a long career of working with dying patients and their families. In the best doctor of that sort we would find kindness, warmth, and compassion. There would be feeling. But emotion would be unlikely. You would sympathize but you would not go through mourning of

our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason

the absence of emotion prescribed by the Stoics in response to a thing is also what we would expect naturally from long enough exposure to it.

Only the novice is inflated and grasping and fearful; but we are all novices. Life is regrettably short because it does not allow us enough trials to become as wise as we would wish. Stoic philosophy is a compensation – a substitute for time, or simulation of it. Stoicism means to offer the wisdom while skipping the repetition; it tries to get by c

If distress is caused by our thoughts about things rather than by the things themselves, we should try dropping those thoughts and using new ones.

Our ultimate insignificance makes the case for living well in the present, for no other purpose survives. It

An ancient Greek saying holds that we are tormented not by things themselves but by the opinions that we have of them.

Our good or bad depends on no one but ourselves. Montaigne,

Experience is humbling. Instead you might have other types of joy – the calm kind that comes from appreciation and understanding.