Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave (The Stoic Virtues Series)

A scare is a temporary rush of a feeling. That can be forgiven. Fear is a state of being, and to allow it to rule is a disgrace.

They are not nearly as formidable as your mind makes you think.

“There are always more of them before they are counted.”

There is no deed in this life so impossible that you cannot do it. Your whole life should be lived as a heroic deed.

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion,” Nightingale wrote.

the root of most fear is what other people will think of us.

Varlam Shalamov was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. What were his crimes? The same crimes that brought most people to those frozen hellholes: Falling on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime. Random bad luck. Daring to criticize the powers that be. For not being communist enough. For not confessing, though that hardly

Know-how is a help. But it’s preparation that makes you brave.

It’s ironic, the Stoics would say, that for all our selfish cares about ourselves, we seem to value other people’s opinions about us more than our own. The freed slave Epictetus says, “If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.” Can you do that? You’ll have to.

By definition, each of us is original. Our DNA has never existed before on this planet. No one has ever had our unique set of experiences. Yet what do we do with this heritage? We push it away. We choose not to be ourselves. We choose to go along, to not raise any eyebrows.