Put up with being laughed at on occasion; look around you, and give yourself a good shaking to find out who you really are.
Who are these people whose admiration you seek? Aren’t they the ones you are used to describing as mad? Well, then, is that what you want – to be admired by lunatics?
Epictetus, Discourses
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BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
The rejection of freedom does not leave a man unpunished. It turns him into a slave of necessity.
Victor Gorskii
Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for a man to bear, something he tries to escape from?
People above the line of base subsistence, in this age, and all earlier ages, do not use surplus, which society has given them, primarily for useful purposes. They do not seek to expand their own lives, to live more wisely, intelligently, understanding, but to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus…spending money, time and effort quite uselessly in the pleasurable business of inflating the ego.
Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted.
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content- a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father.
Fear of Death and a Fear of Life (Physiological and Psychological Death)
We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves…And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.
When you let your attention slide for a bit, don’t think you will get back a grip on it whenever you wish—instead, bear in mind that because of today’s mistake everything that follows will be necessarily worse. . . .
1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing.
Grey Brick Road 