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“Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend…or not even a legend. Think of all the examples. And how trivial the things we want so passionately are. An emotional response is a human response, I get it. I too have succumbed to emotion, more often than I care to admit. But it is also a futile response. It isn’t an objectively beneficial response. This is central to Stoicism.”
― Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage
― Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage
“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”
― Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium: Latin Text
― Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium: Latin Text
“Keeping a stiff upper lip may be needed while around the person invalidating you, but on your own, there is every reason to be compassionate and self-soothing. It does hurt to be invalidated.”
― DBT Skills Training: Manual
― DBT Skills Training: Manual
“At the crisis of my fever, I besought Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make me sensible of his own presence… then he should be the witness how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still impresses me almost a matter of regret, that I did not die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to do it”
― The Blithedale Romance
― The Blithedale Romance
“But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body.”
― Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero
― Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero
James’s 2025 Year in Books
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