Philosophy on self-mastery
21 passages from 7 thinkers — Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Nietzsche and others — on self-mastery.
“The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”
“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.”
“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as a tree as it ought to be.”
“No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.”
“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.”
“It pertains to all men to know themselves and to learn self-control.”
“Self-control and resistance to distractions. Optimism in adversity—especially illness. (Hays translation)”
“Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. (Hays translation)”
“What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it. (Hays translation)”
“Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.”
“As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.”
“A man should be upright, not kept upright.”
“Choose what's best.—Best is what benefits me. (Hays translation)”
“Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth. (Hays translation)”
“Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions. (Hays translation)”
“Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.”
“That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.”
“Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.”