Stoic Meditations

If exercising virtue is pleasurable, aren't the Stoics a kind of Epicureans in disguise? Not at all, because the pleasure of virtue is a byproduct, not the main goal.

A mind in harmony with itself is a virtuous one, because it is the vices that are at war with each other.

The ancients bade us lead the highest, not the most pleasant life, in order that pleasure might not be the guide but the companion of a right-thinking and honorable mind.

If pleasure and virtue were entirely inseparable, we should not see some things to be pleasant, but not honorable, and others most honorable indeed, but hard and only to be attained by suffering.

That person is happy, whose reason recommends to them the whole posture of their affairs.

For no one can be styled happy who is beyond the influence of truth.

A person may be called “happy” who, thanks to reason, has ceased either to hope or to fear: but rocks also feel neither fear nor sadness, yet no one would call those things happy which cannot comprehend what happiness is.

The highest good is a mind which despises the accidents of fortune, and takes pleasure in virtue.

A happy life must also set due value upon all the things which adorn our lives, without over-estimating any one of them, and must be able to enjoy the bounty of Fortune without becoming her slave.

When I say “our opinion,” I do not bind myself to any one of the chiefs of the Stoic school, for I too have a right to form my own opinion.