Michael Prather’s Reviews > Letters from a Stoic > Status Update

What‟s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then?

A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good
ending.

You want to live – but do you know how to live? You are scared of dying – and, tell me, is the kind of life you lead really any different from being dead?

The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.

There's nothing to stop you enjoying the company of absent friends, as often as you like, too, and for as long as you like. This pleasure in their company – and there's no greater pleasure – is one we enjoy the more
when we're absent from one another

As it is, instead of traveling, you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

Do you think you are the only person to have had this experience? Are you really surprised, as if it were something unprecedented, that so long a tour and such diversity of scene have not enabled you to throw off this melancholy and this feeling of depression?

The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others.
Whoever has said 'I have lived' receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning

There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone
mad. Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people's hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual.