Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
~ Viktor Frankl
Elsewhere, this is 4a306. — slipbox
Between stimulus and response →
The greatest gift →
How? Patience, honesty, humility →
No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity. They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice? A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring. How? By working to win your freedom. hour by hour,. Through patience, honesty, humility.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Elsewhere, this is 4a81. — slipbox
Show yourself first →
If you should ever turn your will to things outside your control in order to impress someone, be sure that you have wrecked your whole purpose in life. Be content, then, to be a philosopher in all that you do, and if you wish also to be seen as one, show yourself first that you are and you will succeed.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a15. — slipbox
Complete tranquility →
People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: You can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: Complete tranquility. And by tranquility I mean a kind of harmony.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Elsewhere, this is 4a46. — slipbox
To choose one’s attitude →
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~ Viktor Frankl
Elsewhere, this is 4a36. — slipbox
Disaster is virtue’s opportunity →
Do not, I beseech you, dread the things which the immortal gods apply to our souls like goads; disaster is virtue’s opportunity. Those whom an excess of prosperity has rendered sluggish may justly be called unfortunate; a dead calm holds them fast, as it were, on a motionless sea. And whatever befalls them comes as a surprise. Cruelty presses hardest on the inexperienced; the neck chafes at the yoke.
~ Seneca
Elsewhere, this is 4a434. — slipbox
Justice →
Not to be driven this way and that, but always to behave with justice and see things as they are.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Elsewhere, this is 4a1068. — slipbox
All excesses are injurious →
All excesses are injurious, but immoderate prosperity is the most dangerous of all. It affects the brain, it conjures empty fantasies up in the mind, and it befogs the distinction between true and false with a confusing cloud. Is it not better to endure everlasting misfortune, with virtue’s help, than to burst with endless and immoderate prosperity? Death by starvation comes gently, gluttony makes men explode.
~ Seneca
Elsewhere, this is 4a431. — slipbox
The beginning of philosophy →
The beginning of philosophy is this: The realization that there is a conflict between the opinions of men and a search for the origin of that conflict, accompanied by a mistrust towards mere opinion, and an investigation of opinion to see if it is correct opinion, and the discovery of a certain standard of judgement, comparable to the balance that we have discovered for determining weights, or the rule, for things straight and crooked.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a443. — slipbox