William B. Irvine > Quotes

“pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take. (In particular, the Stoics thought it possible for a person to retain his tranquility despite being punished for attempting to reform the society in which he lived.)”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. •”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“For the Stoics, however, the near impossibility of becoming a sage is not a problem. They talk about sages primarily so they will have a model to guide them in their practice of Stoicism. The sage is a target for them to aim at, even though they will probably fail to hit it. The sage, in other words, is to Stoicism as Buddha is to Buddhism. Most Buddhists can never hope to become as enlightened as Buddha, but nevertheless, reflecting on Buddha's perfection can help them gain a degree of enlightenment.”
― William B. Irvine, Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Rather, Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“The problem is that “bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters,” and because they cannot control their desires, they can never find contentment.4”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”1 Another thing to keep in mind”
― William B. Irvine, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient

“On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy