How To Be A Stoic

enjoy the company and love of our fellow humans as much as possible while we can, trying hard not to take them for granted, because it is certain that one day we and they will be gone and the only right “season” for appreciating them will have passed.

When it comes to food, responsible people favor what is easy to obtain over what is difficult, what involves no trouble over what does, and what is available over what isn’t.” Now this strikes very close to

“If [you] must live in a palace,9 then [you] can also live well in a palace.”

This is what good philosophers—and reasonable people in general—are supposed to do: listen to each other’s arguments, learn and reflect, and go out for a beer to talk it over some more.

we must have wisdom3—the ability to navigate well the diverse, complex, and often contradictory circumstances of our lives.

four aspects of virtue, which they thought of as four tightly interlinked character traits: (practical) wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

wisdom allows us to make decisions that improve our eudaimonia, the (ethically) good life.

Courage can be physical, but more broadly refers to the moral aspect—for instance, the ability to act well under challenging circumstances,

Temperance makes it possible for us to control our desires and actions so that we don’t yield to excesses.

Justice, for Socrates and the Stoics, refers not to an abstract theory of how society should be run, but rather to the practice of treating other human beings with dignity and fairness.

virtue is an all-or-nothing package.

Cognitive dissonance is a very uncomfortable psychological state that occurs when someone becomes aware of the conflict between two judgments that he holds to be equally true.

Observing and imitating role models, then, is one powerful way to work on our own virtue.

The problem nowadays is that, by and large, we do a pretty bad job of picking role models. We glorify actors, singers, athletes, and generic “celebrities,” only to be disappointed when—predictably—it turns out that their excellence at reciting, singing, playing basketball, or racking up Facebook likes and Twitter followers has pretty much nothing to do with their moral fiber.

making perfection an integral part of our concept of role model means that we are setting a standard that is impossibly high.

The Stoic gamble was that hearing about people like Cato, Stockdale, and the others we have encountered here helps us put things into perspective—that is, to become slightly better human beings than we already are.

Life only happens once, and we learn “in the air,” not in a safe environment.

The emphasis, for every human being, should be on what we can do, not on what we cannot do. Instead of saying, “I can’t do that,” say, “I can do it this way.”

we need to develop a life plan. To do this we must take a look at our entire life, make plans, and arrive at decisions “all things considered

we should strive for internal harmony, which is a matter of constantly attempting to harmonize the components of our (dynamic) life plan.