Status Updates From Courage Under Fire: Testing...

“…the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame!”

“…frequent sessions with your interrogator to check your attitude and if judged wrong, then down the torture chute of confession, guilt, apology and atonement.”

“The judgement seat and a prison is each a place, the one high, the other low; but the attitude of your will can be kept the same, if you want to keep it the same, in either place.”

“Control fear. Control guilt.”

“Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you.”

“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the Will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find such things to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.”

“If you want to protect yourself from fear and guilt- the real long-term destroyers of will- you will have to get rid of all your instincts to compromise, to meet people halfway.”

Never beg: “For it is better to die of hunger, exempt from fear and guilt, than to live in affluence with perturbation.”

“A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.”

“He who craves or shuns things not under his control can either be faithful nor free, but must himself be changed and tossed to and fro and must end by subordinating himself to others.”

“For what are tragedies but the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have admired things external?

“So make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference, not with contempt, only with indifference.”

“…the realization of your own fragility— that you can be reduced by wind and rain and ice and seawater or men to a helpless, sobbing wreck— unable to control even your own bowels— in a matter of minutes.”

“A stoic always keeps separate files in his mind for (a) those things that are up to him and (b) those things that are are not within his power.”

“For it is impossible in such a body as ours, in this universe that envelops us, among these fellow-creatures of ours, that such things should not happen, some to one man, some to another.”

“Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses. If it be His pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, see that you act it well.”

“Life is being a soldier.”

“Do you not know that life is a soldiers service?”

“What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity.”

“Who is your master? He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart.”

“You can only be a victim of yourself.”

“It is unthinkable that one man’s error could cause another’s suffering. Suffering was all due to remorse at destroying yourself.”

“A man is responsible for his own judgements, even in dreams, in drunkenness, and in melancholy madness.”

Let others practice lawsuits, others study problems, others syllogisms; here you practice how to die, how to be enchained, how to be racked, how to be exiled.”