Tusculan Disputations

Anyone who has fully performed the obligation of perfect virtue has not lived too briefly.”

“Yet when you carefully consider the true nature of unexpected events, you will discover without exception that all such events appear greater than they really are.”

answers that might save his sanity and his soul. What predicament could be more “modern” than this? Who among us is not looking for ways to alleviate the fear of death, to deal with pain, and to cope with anxiety and grief? Who among us has not wondered if virtue was truly necessary for living a happy life?

Cicero recoils from this idea, as pain is an unavoidable part of life. Learning to endure it is something every seeker of virtue must accept: “We must not ask whether pain is an evil; rather, we must fortify the soul in order to bear pain’s burdens.

but he who is incapable of organizing and explaining his thoughts in written form, and unable to engage the reader with a bit of allure, is someone who egregiously wastes both his spare time and his words.

As we work our way through the flow of conversation in the Tusculans, we sense that the fundamental theme running through all five books is this: how does one go about living a happy life?

Happiness is possible even in the midst of the most terrible sufferings. The wise man can be happy even if he lives in obscurity, is underappreciated, or finds himself exiled. Neither blindness nor deafness can prevent the wise man

“As I see it, in life we should keep to the guiding principle that the Greeks apply at their dinner parties. It says, ‘Let him either drink, or leave.’”

The book is an agonizingly honest personal testament written by a suffering man who was groping in the dark for