Rarer than a rare gem, courage is something we must hold up to inspect from many angles. By looking at its many parts and cuts, its perfections and its flaws, we can come away with an understanding of the value of the whole. Each of these perspectives gives us a little more insight.
Don’t gloat; there’s nothing in it for you.
Uninvited guests might arrive at your home, but you don’t have to ask them to stay for dinner. You don’t have to let them into your mind.
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Publilius Syrus.
It’s worth remembering that most people die in bed. Getting up and getting active is much safer!
There’s an old proverb that money doesn’t change people, it just makes them more of who they are. Robert Caro has written that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.” In some ways, prosperity – financial and personal – is the same way.
Vain men never hear anything but praise.
Only you will know what you need to practice from morning until night, what to repeat ten thousand times.
At every step and every juncture in life, there is the opportunity to learn – and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let ego block us from hearing it again.
Remember and remind yourself of a phrase favored by Epictetus: “persist and resist.” Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.
We don’t need accomplishments to feel good or to be good enough. What do we need? The truth: not much! Some food and water. Work that we can challenge ourselves with. A calm mind in the midst of adversity. Sleep. A solid routine. A cause we are committed to. Something we’re getting better at. Everything else is extra. Or worse, as history has shown countless times, the source of our painful downfall.
But that’s what the greats do, they don’t just show up, they do more than practice, they do the work.
You have the choice to be truthful. You have the choice to be dignified. You can choose to endure. You can choose to be happy. You can choose to be chaste. You can choose to be thrifty. You can choose to be kind to others. You can choose to be free. You can persist under difficult odds. You can avoid trafficking in gossip. You can choose to be gracious. And honestly, aren’t the traits that are the result of effort and skill more impressive anyway?
The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong.
Our reaction is what actually decides whether harm has occurred.
How often does that happen to us? We comfort a friend during a breakup, only to be surprised when our own relationship ends. We must prepare in our minds for the possibility of extreme reversals of fate. The next time you make a donation to charity, don’t just think about the good turn you’re doing, but take a moment to consider that one day you may need to receive charity yourself.
Take a little time today to remember that you’re blessed with the capacity to use logic and reason to navigate situations and circumstances. This gives you unthinkable power to alter your circumstances and the circumstances of others. And remember that with power comes responsibility.
It’s not by eliminating outside influences or running away to quiet and solitude. Instead, it’s about filtering the outside world through the straightener of our judgment.
If they can force you,” Seneca has Hercules say in one of his plays, “then you’ve forgotten how to die.” Remember that.
Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.” – MARCUS AURELIUS.