32 Quotes by William B. Irvine

Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.

When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.

It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united.“3.

We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.

More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.

A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This.

On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.

It will help us to overcome our anger, says Seneca, if we remind ourselves that our behavior also angers other people: “We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.