Pragmatic Wisdom: 10 Stoic Quotes to Enhance Your Life
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Chapter 1: Understanding Pragmatism
Pragmatism is the art of approaching situations with practicality and realism, focusing on sensible outcomes. This mindset cultivates qualities that allow you to be:
- Objective
- Decisive
- Productive
- Conclusive
Embracing a pragmatic approach can significantly boost your personal and professional success. Throughout August, Ryan Holiday delves into essential principles that embody pragmatism and how to cultivate them.
Section 1.1: The Good Life Is Within Reach
“At this moment you aren’t on a journey, but wandering about, being driven from place to place, even though what you seek — to live well — is found in all places. Is there any place more full of confusion than the Forum? Yet even there you can live at peace, if needed.”
— SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 28.5b–6a
Section 1.2: Shift Your Focus
“You must stop blaming God, and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret.”
— EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.22.13
Subsection 1.2.1: Finding Humor in Life
“Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public — Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so, we should take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.”
— SENECA, ON TRANQUILITY OF MIND, 15.2
Section 1.3: Contentment with What You Have
“No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.”
— SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 123.3
Chapter 2: Overcoming Inertia
This video, 10 Stoic Quotes That Will Motivate You To Seize The Day, highlights powerful Stoic wisdom that encourages an active and engaged approach to life.
Section 2.1: Confronting Laziness
“Anything that must yet be done, virtue can do with courage and promptness. For anyone would call it a sign of foolishness for one to undertake a task with a lazy and begrudging spirit, or to push the body in one direction and the mind in another, to be torn apart by wildly divergent impulses.”
— SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 31.b–32
Section 2.2: Avoiding Premature Misery
“It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest — by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things.”
— SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 98.5b–6a
Subsection 2.2.1: Simplifying Life
“It is said that if you would have peace of mind, busy yourself with little. But wouldn’t a better saying be do what you must and as required of a rational being created for public life? For this brings not only the peace of mind of doing few things, but the greater peace of doing them well. Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility.”
— MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 4.24
Section 2.3: Stick to the Essentials
“Don’t tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It’s been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report — the report wasn’t that you’ve been harmed. I see that my son is sick — but not that his life is at risk.”
— MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.49
Chapter 3: The Purpose of Philosophy
In the video Stoic Quotes I Wish I Learned When I Was Younger, we explore essential Stoic teachings that can guide us through life's challenges.
Section 3.1: Philosophy's Role in Life
“Philosophy isn’t a parlor trick or made for show. It shapes and builds up the soul, it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done — it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties.”
— SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 16.3
Section 3.2: The Strength of Silence
“Silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life.”
— SENECA, THYESTES, 309