Hardship and Happiness

That the mind that has overcome so many miseries is ashamed to be distressed by one more wound on a body already so scarred.

We can have a life that truly involves joy (of the right sort) if we appreciate that the most precious thing of all, and the only truly precious thing, lies within our control at all times.

Stoic life is a constant therapeutic process in which mental exercises are devised to wean the mind from its unwise attachments.

O, how lacking in awareness of their sufferings are those who do not praise death and do not look forward to it as nature’s finest discovery, whether it sets a seal on our happiness, or keeps disaster at bay, or ends the old man’s jadedness and weariness, or cuts a young life short in its prime when even better things are expected, or calls a halt to childhood before the more difficult stages are reached: for everybody death is an end, for many a cure, for some an answer to prayer; and it does no one a greater favor than those to whom it comes without waiting to be asked.