16. To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.
Other people may try to impede your actions, but they can’t impede your thoughts and disposition. Using your reason and imagination, you can find a way to turn any impediment to your advantage.
How foolish it is, then, to puff yourself up with pride or berate yourself with worry. Think of the boundless abyss of the past behind you and the infinite future stretching out ahead. From this perspective, how small are your achievements – and how petty your troubles.
Did someone do me wrong? That’s their problem – they harmed their own character, not mine. I will stay focused on my own thoughts and actions.
So it is that we have more respect for what our neighbours will think of us than we have for ourselves.
Live such that, when your life is at its end, you may look back and recall how many beautiful things you’ve seen, how many pains you’ve patiently endured, how many pleasures you’ve passed by to stay on your path, and how many disagreeable people you’ve treated kindly.
Remember that as it is a shame to be surprised if the fig-tree produces figs, so it is to be surprised if the world produces such and such things of which it is productive.
Even if it were possible for you to be remembered eternally, what is remembrance worth to you? Nothing. What, then, should we strive for in life? Right thoughts, beneficial actions, honest speech, and a cheerful disposition. These things are in harmony with, and flow from, the eternal Source of all.
Be like a promontory against which the waves are always breaking. It stands fast, and stills the waters that rage around it.
Indeed, no one can thwart the purposes of your mind – for they can’t be touched by fire, steel, tyranny, slander, or anything.
What is the best way to avenge a wrong? If you retaliate in kind, returning evil for evil, your attacker succeeds in dragging you down to their level. Instead, take the insult or injury and transform it into a means of becoming a better person. This is the only true vengeance.
Reason is free from hatred, has no desire to harm anyone or anything, and will never direct you to do evil. Reason works to the benefit of all things.
The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.
The Stoics would permit of no such compromise. Virtue, and virtue only, was what they demanded. Thevirtuous man might be a slave, a victim to disease, to poverty, might be deprived of all he loved, yet he would remain solely and absolutely happy. Virtue was one and indivisible. Whoever was not virtuous was vicious ; there was no middle course.
We know too well that men are not divided into virtuous and vicious, but all possess some share of good and evil, and that most men desire what is right, and fail, whenthey do, from weakness rather than viciousness. The Stoics, who demanded absolute virtue and disregard of externals, had to confess that the wise men were few and the foolish legion.
Don’t waste the rest of your life worrying about what others think and do. Direct your thoughts to a useful end. When you dissipate your mental energy on things you can’t control, you lose the opportunity to accomplish something yourself.
If he is going wrong, teach him kindly and show him what he has failed to see. If you can’t do that, blame yourself – or perhaps not even yourself.
That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales. Keep looking closely like that, and embody it in your actions: goodness – what defines a good person.
How easy it is to drive away or obliterate from one’s mind every impression which is troublesome or alien, and then to be immediately in perfect calm. p36.
Nothing happens to anyone that he is not fitted by nature to bear.
The best answer to anger is silence.