Matthew Van Natta > Quotes

“Your mind is yours—and yours alone. If you focus on healthy thoughts and develop balanced opinions about your situation, you will cultivate positive emotions and find lasting enthusiasm to live your best life. You will see negativity for what it is: a waste of energy. You will learn to stop allowing fear, anger, and other anxieties to grow. You will discover not only that you can weather challenges, but you often find them enjoyable.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness; let us say ‘I have lived; the course which Fortune set for me is finished.’ And if God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts. A person is happiest, and is secure in his own possession of himself, who can await the morrow without apprehension. When a man has said: ‘I have lived!’, every”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“These two things must be cut away: fear of the future, and the memory of past sufferings. The latter no longer concerns me, and the future does not concern me yet.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“As you aim for just outcomes, realize that what you control are your intentions and the actions that come from them. Focusing on your own actions will give you the best chance of reaching external goals.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“To stop talking about what the good person is like, and just be one.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10:16”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“The Discipline of Assent trains you to pay attention to your thought process and cultivate a healthy mind. Assent, in Stoicism, means saying yes to information you have received. Stoicism asks you to pause and think about your responses to life, rather than allowing instinct and habit to run your life.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“When you’re with a person that you care for, draw your attention to them, to the moment you are sharing. Don’t allow your thoughts to be lost in desires or fears of the future. At the same time, don’t forget that everything you have is on loan. Someday you will return it. This makes the present moment all the more important. Why waste your time on the unknowable future when you can find happiness in the present moment? Invest fully in the now so that when change comes, there will be no sense of loss, because you truly got all you could from the time that you had.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“When you do a thing because you have determined that it ought to be done, never avoid being seen doing it, even if the opinion of the multitude is going to condemn you. For if your action is wrong, then avoid doing it altogether, but if it is right, why do you fear those who will rebuke you wrongly?” —Epictetus, Enchiridion 35”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“•The Discipline of Desire entails a radical realignment of your values as you work to desire only what is within your complete control.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“each”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“The one thing you control is yourself. As you learn to seek out a good flow of life, look at your own choices first, before judging the actions of others.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Marcus Aurelius, “Waste no more time thinking about what a good person should be, just be one.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“of making decisions out of lust. He said that it is simply friction, a momentary spasm, and a sticky liquid—not the most flattering portrayal.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Dichotomy of Control, which helps me focus on those things I have the ability to change.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“How could you not know change was coming? It’s everywhere, after all.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“To stop talking about what the good person is like, and just be one.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“People feel disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.” —Epictetus, Enchiridion”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Stoicism says you can thrive in life—no matter your circumstances.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“REFLECTION “If you do not know to which port you are sailing, then no wind is favorable.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“remind yourself that there are two ways to engage, and pick the better one.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Modernstoicism.com”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“To stop talking about what the good person is like, and just be one.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Another way to understand moderation is to think of yourself as a guest in someone else’s house. How do you treat things when you know you’re only borrowing them? All things are impermanent. What you have today will be used up, might break or be taken away, and won’t be yours forever. If you live as if things are permanent, in a world where that is never true, it will hurt to lose them. That hurt comes from unrealistic thoughts. If you assume that good health is your right, then even”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“To develop consistent happiness, you must train yourself to desire only what you can always have, and fear only what you can always avoid.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“Above all, Stoicism aims to make you skillful at life. We call this life expertise virtue. The Stoic philosophy trains you in virtue: It sculpts your moral character into someone who is content, joyful, resilient, and able to take actions that make the world a better place.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity

“If you want lasting happiness, instead, properly arrange what’s inside you—not the things surrounding you.”
― Matthew Van Natta, The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity