Stoic Meditations

How unhappy are they whose appetite can only be aroused by costly food! And the costliness of food depends not upon its delightful flavor and sweetness of taste, but upon its rarity and the difficulty of procuring it.

Whithersoever we betake ourselves two most excellent things will accompany us, namely, a common Nature and our own special virtue.

No one loses anything by the frowns of Fortune unless they have been deceived by her smiles. The one who has not been puffed up by success, does not collapse after failure.

Always stand as it were on guard, and mark the attacks and charges of Fortune long before she delivers them; she is only terrible to those whom she catches unawares.

External circumstances have very little importance either for good or for evil: wise persons are neither elated by prosperity nor depressed by adversity.

You have gained nothing by so many misfortunes, if you have not learned how to suffer.

Cicero reminds us that - when life is truly unbearable and we can no longer act virtuously - we have one last escape route, the guarantor of our ultimate freedom: death itself.

We are all truly deaf with regard to those innumerable languages which we do not understand. Then, as I before referred the blind to the pleasures of hearing, so I may the deaf to the pleasures of sight.

The reply of Antipater the Cyrenaic to some women who bewailed his being blind, though it is a little too obscene, is not without its significance. “What do you mean?,” said he, “do you think the night can furnish no pleasure?”

Cicero explains why being sent out of one's country is not a hardship worth worrying about, and tells us that Socrates regarded the whole world as his country.

Cicero tells us about a letter written by Plato during his stint in Syracuse, explaining why temperance is the most fundamental of the four cardinal virtues.

They relate, too, of Socrates, that, once when he was walking very fast till the evening, on his being asked why he did so, his reply was that he was purchasing an appetite by walking, that he might sup the better.

Socrates, when on one occasion he saw a great quantity of gold and silver carried in a procession, cried out, “How many things are there which I do not want!”

There are three kinds of goods: the greatest being those of the mind; the next best those of the body; the third are external goods, as the Peripatetics call them, and the Old Academics differ very little from them.

Cicero gives us a rundown of the major Hellenistic schools, which differed in the way they understood eudaimonia, the life worth living.

Shall virtue, then, yield to pain? Shall the happy life of a wise person succumb to it? Good Gods! How base would this be! Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan.

Cicero tells the famous story of Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, and one of his flatterers, Damocles, who learns the hard way that what may look like a happy life is actually nothing of the sort.

Cicero makes one of a number of arguments for why virtue is the only guarantor of a happy life. Let's examine the validity of the argument's structure and the soundness of its premises.

We are not, therefore, to form our judgment of philosophers from detached sentences, but from their consistency with themselves, and their ordinary manner of talking.

Cicero makes a strong argument, based on Socratic and Stoic positions, for why virtue is necessary and sufficient for "happiness," if we translate the Greek word eudaimonia as "the life worth living."