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

with respect to emotion and adversity, Stoics want the kind of wisdom that we associate with long experience. But in certain settings they seek, in effect, the attitude of the newcomer.

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

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

You will learn the truth by experience: the things that people value highly and try hardest to get do them no good once they have them. Those who don’t have them imagine that, once they do, everything good will be theirs; then they do get them, and the heat of their desires is the same, their agitation is the same, their disgust with what they poss

Each of us is as well or badly off as we believe. The happy are those who think they are, not those who are thought to be so by others; and in this way alone, belief makes itself real and true. Montaigne,

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

Anyone who crows about being a Stoic isn’t; progress in Stoicism may be measured in part by one’s awareness of failure at it.

The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.