Stoic Meditations

We should not take sorrows on ourselves upon another’s account; but we ought to relieve others of their grief if we can.

Anger is in no wise becoming in an orator, though it is not amiss to affect it. Do you imagine that I am angry when in pleading I use any extraordinary vehemence and sharpness?

What is Chrysippus’s definition? Fortitude, says he, is the knowledge of all things that are bearable, or an affection of the mind which bears and supports everything in obedience to the chief law of reason without fear.

Take care how you make courage to depend in the least on rage. For anger is altogether irrational, and that is not courage which is void of reason.

For whoever prescribes bounds to vice admits a part of it, which, as it is odious of itself, becomes the more so as it stands on slippery ground, and, being once set forward, glides on headlong, and cannot by any means be stopped.

There is an important distinction to be made between instrumental reason, which is morally neutral, and what the Stoics call "right" reason, or virtue, which comes with a built-in moral prescription.

Cicero says that our mind becomes sick when our opinions and judgments are not coherent with each other, just like our body becomes sick when one of its parts is in disharmony with the rest.

Money, fame, and sexual pleasure are not problematic per se. They may be preferred or dispreferred, so long as they don’t control us and lead us away from a virtuous life. Own your desires and pleasures, do not be own by them.

Intemperance, which is in opposition to reason, inflames, confounds, and puts every state of the mind into a violent motion. Thus, grief and fear, and every other perturbation of the mind, have their rise from intemperance.

Cicero continues his classification of the emotions as seen by the Stoics. Envy, for instance, is a type of grief generated by the mistaken belief that the prosperity of another is an injury to ourselves.