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

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