Quotes from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“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.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take. (In particular, the Stoics thought it possible for a person to retain his tranquility despite being punished for attempting to reform the society in which he lived.)”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“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.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“For the Stoics, however, the near impossibility of becoming a sage is not a problem. They talk about sages primarily so they will have a model to guide them in their practice of Stoicism. The sage is a target for them to aim at, even though they will probably fail to hit it. The sage, in other words, is to Stoicism as Buddha is to Buddhism. Most Buddhists can never hope to become as enlightened as Buddha, but nevertheless, reflecting on Buddha's perfection can help them gain a degree of enlightenment.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“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.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Pre-Socratic philosophy begins ... with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man's soul."3”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united."3”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic 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.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“The problem is that “bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters,” and because they cannot control their desires, they can never find contentment.4”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having—not, at any rate, if what we seek is tranquility—and therefore aren’t worth pursuing. Likewise, we should use our reasoning ability to convince ourselves that even though certain activities are pleasurable, engaging in those activities will disrupt our tranquility, and the tranquility lost will outweigh the pleasure gained. •”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. •”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence. By practicing Stoic techniques, we can cure the disease and thereby gain tranquility.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“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”
― William B. Irvine, quote from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

About the author

Popular quotes

“Do you remember, Meir, that epigram quoted in the name of Rabbi Johanan ben Zaccai: 'There is no truth unless there be a faith on which it may rest'? Ironically enough the only sure principle I have achieved is this which I have known almost all my life. And it is so. For all truths rest ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, the sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and orderliness of the world of nature. In every realm one must lay down postulates or he shall have nothing at all. So with morality and religion. Faith and reason are not antagonists. On the contrary, salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion and to draw the fullness of their implications. It is not certainty which one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf

“Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion; but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.”
― Isaac Newton, quote from The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

“perhaps Dawood’s status as a fugitive and an outlaw beyond the reach of the Indian legal system suits many back home in India. Empires built with his money would collapse and many skeletons would tumble out of the closet if he was ever brought back home. The powers that be would rather have Dawood Ibrahim stuck in Pakistan. And so the cult of Dawood will be perpetuated.”
― S. Hussain Zaidi, quote from Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia

“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.”
― Austin Kleon, quote from Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“You smell salty," he says. "Like the ocean." He leans closer to me and licks up the side of my face. "You taste salty too. Maybe I should grab a bottle of tequila and we should have some fun." He moves his eyebrows up and down. "What do you say? We'll do some shots and I'll lick you all over.”
― Jillian Dodd, quote from Stalk Me

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.