Daniel

“Hold sacred your capacity for understanding. For in it is all, that our ruling principle won’t allow anything to enter that is either inconsistent with nature or with the constitution of a logical creature. It’s what demands due diligence, care for others, and obedience to God.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

“Your detractors provide valuable lessons. Ask yourself if their criticisms are correct. If so, then improve yourself, and be grateful for their guidance. If, on the other hand, their criticisms are misguided, then recognize that their error is nothing to you. Let them persist in their misperceptions if they must. Should they change their minds and come to respect you, recognize that this is equally insignificant. Perhaps the praise will prove as well or ill-placed as the criticism. Perhaps both assessments will prove inapt and inaccurate. What of it? The wind blows, the people form beliefs, the river flows, and, in the end, the world swallows it all.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“Socrates thought that the Spartans’ singular style of speech was a way of strategically getting others to underestimate them: “they conceal their wisdom, and pretend to be blockheads, so that they may seem to be superior only because of their prowess in battle…This is how you may know that I am speaking the truth and that the Spartans are the best educated in philosophy and speaking: if you talk to any ordinary Spartan, he seems to be stupid, but eventually, like an expert marksman, he shoots in some brief remark that proves you to be only a child.”
― The Art of Manliness, The Spartan Way: What Modern Men Can Learn from Ancient Warriors

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War”
― Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18