underscored

@underscored

41 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:stoicismClear

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus (-300)
21h ago

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.

21h ago

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

1d ago

The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you must also endure its pains. Whether you like it or not, you cannot have one without the other.

1d ago

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

1d ago

The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.

4d ago

We shall not pretend that life is all beauty; we shall, as tragic poets always do, start with evil, and only then show that the noblest response to evil is not flight from it but the courage to face it.

6d ago

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more.

1w ago

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

1w ago

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by love for something outside ourselves.

2w ago

A man may take to drink on account of his wife, but he ought never to take to drink on account of his wife's husband.

2w ago

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.

3w ago

We are always dying. From the moment we are born, we begin the process of dying. We do not know how long we shall live—how many years or months or days.

4w ago

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

4w ago

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

1mo ago

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet one cannot stop from living in the world. This is the paradox of consciousness itself—that we become most fully alive precisely through our capacity to suffer.

1mo ago

If we abandon introspection and critical thinking, we descend to an animal life—and that is unworthy of us as human beings.

1mo ago

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness.

1mo ago

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

1mo ago

The great majority of us are not in a position in life to choose our work in the sense of selecting a particular job. We find ourselves in a particular situation, born into a particular family, in a particular town, with particular talents and disabilities. And our duty is to make the best of it.

1mo ago

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is an affront.

1mo ago

The more you own, the more it owns you. We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of how to live simply can save us.

1mo ago

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

1mo ago

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he would be none the better for the drinking; whereas, if he takes to reading, he will become wise.

2mo ago

Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats "let us hope" does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.

2mo ago

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. The apparent leisureliness of natural processes conceals an efficiency that frantic human activity can never match.

2mo ago

The more you own, the more it owns you.

2mo ago

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

2mo ago

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through love and beauty and truth.

2mo ago

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in all those thoughts. We think too much and feel too little. We have lost our minds and forgotten our hearts.

2mo ago

To be entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. The first principle for the relations between States should be loyalty to natural obligations of human beings, not to the state, whenever these conflict. A man who truly believes in an ordered society must believe in the equality of human rights.

2mo ago

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our own thoughts.

2mo ago

We are not the measure of all things. There is much in the world that is indifferent to human purposes, and this indifference is a kind of freedom—for us and for reality itself.

2mo ago

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through the bars of understanding something larger than ourselves.

3mo ago

The mind is in its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

3mo ago

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he ought to take to work on account of it. Work is the cure, not the cause of the trouble.

3mo ago

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.

3mo ago

As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →