32 Quotes by William B. Irvine

One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you. Consequently, you should keep in mind the words of Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.”1.

To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.

It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want.

Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.

Rather, Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.

Pre-Socratic philosophy begins... with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.“3.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world – in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition.