A hard stretch

One idea from each of the 11 books on this topic.

• Why not leave Athens and keep quiet? Because talking every day about how to live is the greatest good a person has, and “the unexamined life is not worth living”. He knew the jury would find that the hardest part to believe.

  From The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato

• Someone insulted you, hit you, knocked you down, robbed you. You keep that list and read it again every night. Each reading makes the anger new again. People who stop reading the list are the ones whose anger finally goes quiet.

  From Dhammapada by Anonymous

• Every so often, spend 3 or 4 days on the cheapest food and roughest clothes, and ask yourself whether this is what you were afraid of. Soldiers drill in peacetime. Practise hardship while life is kind, and it loses much of its power to scare you.

  From Letters from a Stoic by Seneca

• Children reach into a narrow jar for figs and nuts, grab a fistful, and cry because the hand won’t come out. Drop a few and it slides free. The advice for adults is the same: “do not desire many things and you will have what you want.”

  From Discourses and Enchiridion by Epictetus

• A small flame goes out when you throw something on it. A strong fire takes what you throw on it, burns it, and gets higher. Whatever is blocking you is not separate from the work. It is the material the work now has to use.

  From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

• You get the thing you wanted, and soon you want the next one. That itch is named in a prayer: “our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” The restlessness is not a defect to fix. It points to what the heart was made for.

  From Confessions by Augustine

• Bad luck, Philosophy says, is more useful than good. Good luck always pretends it will stay. “Ill Fortune is always truthful, since, in changing, she shows her inconstancy.” It also shows you who your real friends are, which your success kept hidden.

  From The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

• When someone hits you with a stick, you get angry at the person, not the stick. But the person is driven by anger, the way the stick is driven by the hand. So be angry at the anger, if at anything.

  From The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva

• Caught in a sudden shower, you run along the road and duck under the eaves, and you still get wet. “When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking.” That holds for everything.

  From Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo

• Your mind is not in charge. Wanting comes first and thinking serves it: “The intellect, as the will’s mere tool, is as different from it as is the hammer from the smith.” Notice which way your mistakes fall the next time you add up a bill.

  From The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

• The other way is to shrink. You become useful, likeable, successful, and somehow smaller. The world may praise you for the shrinking. That is how the loss stays quiet.

  From The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard