Stoic Maxims

  • What we bear is not so important as how we bear it.
  • We become happy by not needing happiness.
  • Take care not to make your pain greater by your complaints.
  • Who has the most? He who desires the least.
  • This is education: to learn to wish that things should happen as they do.
  • Freedom is not gained by satisfying, but by restraining our desires.
  • Calamity is opportunity for courage.
  • A man should stand upright, and not be kept upright by others.
  • He has the longest of lives who suffers no time to be lost.
  • They who do not keep striving to advance fall back; no one finds his progress as he left it.
  • The arts serve life, but wisdom rules it.
  • He who spares the bad wrongs the good.
  • Truth conquers by itself, opinion by appealing to externals.
  • Virtue does not come until the character is formed, and taught, and developed by continual exercise.
  • No one is good by accident, virtue must be learned.
  • Do nothing inconsiderately or without a purpose.