William B Irvine Quotes

pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.

if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want.

Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.

To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.

If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take. (In particular, the Stoics thought it possible for a person to retain his tranquility despite being punished for attempting to reform the society in which he lived.)

one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

Rather, Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...

Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.

After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.

Pre-Socratic philosophy begins ... with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man's soul."3

Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.

The problem is that “bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters,” and because they cannot control their desires, they can never find contentment.4

On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.

More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.

If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.

We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We should also, to the extent possible, avoid people whose values are corrupt, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. •

Most of us are “living the dream” living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.

It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united."3

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

It will help us to overcome our anger, says Seneca, if we remind ourselves that our behavior also angers other people: “We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

anger, as I’ve said, is incompatible with joy.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable. One

For the Stoics, however, the near impossibility of becoming a sage is not a problem. They talk about sages primarily so they will have a model to guide them in their practice of Stoicism. The sage is a target for them to aim at, even though they will probably fail to hit it. The sage, in other words, is to Stoicism as Buddha is to Buddhism. Most Buddhists can never hope to become as enlightened as Buddha, but nevertheless, reflecting on Buddha's perfection can help them gain a degree of enlightenment.

Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world—in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition.

BEGIN EACH DAY by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?

Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence. By practicing Stoic techniques, we can cure the disease and thereby gain tranquility.

The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.

we should love all of our dear ones …, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.

He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.

he is blessed who dies not late but well.”) It

Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”1 Another thing to keep in mind

Seneca’s comment to Lucilius that “the man who adapts himself to his slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little sum, is the truly rich man.

He adds that the worse a man is, the less likely he is to accept constructive criticism.

How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.

reason tends to be the servant rather than the master of desire.

there is nothing important, nothing serious, nor wretched either, in the whole outfit of life.

Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. He adds that if we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.

remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice.

easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

Thus, Epictetus advises us to form “a certain character and pattern” for ourselves when we are alone. Then, when we associate with other people, we should remain true to who we are.

When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.

One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you. Consequently, you should keep in mind the words of Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”1

Someone with a coherent philosophy of life will know what in life is worth attaining, and because this person has spent time trying to attain the thing in life he believed to be worth attaining, he has probably attained it, to the extent that it was possible for him to do so. Consequently, when it comes time for him to die, he will not feel cheated. To the contrary, he will, in the words of Musonius, “be set free from the fear of death.”2 Consider,

Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

What this means is that it is entirely possible these days for someone to have been raised in a religion and to have taken philosophy courses in college but still to be lacking a philosophy of life. (Indeed, this is the situation in which most of my students find themselves.) What, then, should those seeking a philosophy of life do? Perhaps their best option is to create for themselves a virtual school of philosophy by reading the works of the philosophers who ran the ancient schools. This, at any rate, is what, in the following pages, I will be encouraging readers to do. I

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could refine his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

A growing number of people have realized that they lack what the ancient philosophers would have called a philosophy of life. Such a philosophy tells you what in life is worth having and provides you with a strategy for obtaining it. If you try to live without a philosophy of life, you will find yourself extemporizing your way through your days. As a result, your daily efforts are likely to be haphazard, and your life is likely to be misspent. What a waste!

We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having—not, at any rate, if what we seek is tranquility—and therefore aren’t worth pursuing. Likewise, we should use our reasoning ability to convince ourselves that even though certain activities are pleasurable, engaging in those activities will disrupt our tranquility, and the tranquility lost will outweigh the pleasure gained. •

Ideally, a Stoic will be oblivious to the services he does for others, as oblivious as a grapevine is when it yields a cluster of grapes to a vintner. He will not pause to boast about the service he has performed but will move on to perform his next service, the way the grape vine moves on to bear more grapes.

One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you. Consequently, you should keep in mind the words of Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.

A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This

According to psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, we have an unfortunate tendency to “miswant”—to want things that we won’t like once we get them. “In a perfect world,” they observe, “wanting would cause trying, trying would cause getting, [and] getting would cause liking.”20 But ours is not a perfect world. In particular, our predictions about what we will like tend to be mistaken, and as a result, we tend to want things that, when we get them, will make little difference to our level of happiness. (The

WHAT DO YOU WANT out of life?

I must die. If forthwith, I die; and if a little later, I will take lunch now,

In the words of Libet, “The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!

If you know why you believe something, you will not be upset by having that belief challenged.

He adds that if we detect anger and hatred within us and wish to seek revenge, one of the best forms of revenge on another person is to refuse to be like him.12 S

we have complete control over our character. We are, he says, the only ones who can stop ourselves from attaining goodness and integrity.

Seneca observes that “chastity comes with time to spare, lechery has never a moment.”11

Why do we care about what other people earn or own? Because we tend to regard life as an ongoing competition for social status. When

Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that “all things everywhere are perishable.

Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy. T

The emotions are perfectly willing to listen to the intellect as long as the intellect isn’t trying to impose its views but is merely trying to help the emotions get what they want.

According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.” He therefore recommends that we “do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: ‘None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!’” After all, what point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?”21

This is because the desire for luxuries is not a natural desire. Natural desires, such as a desire for water when we are thirsty, can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot.12 Therefore, when we find ourselves wanting something, we should pause to ask whether the desire is natural or unnatural, and if it is unnatural, we should think twice about trying to satisfy it.

Most of them, I suspect, come to the mall not because there is something specific that they need to buy. Rather, they come in the hope that doing so will trigger a desire for something that, before going to the mall, they didn't want. It might be a desire for a cashmere sweater, a set of socket wrenches, or the latest cell phone. Why go out of their way to trigger desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has little to do with their long-term happiness as taking a hit of heroin has to do with the long-term happiness of a heroin addict. My ability to form desires for consumer goods seems to have atrophied. What brought about this state of affairs? The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that requiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life.

Psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has gone so far as to argue that conscious will is an illusion—that despite appearances, what causes my finger to rise is not my consciously willing that it rise but something else.

You will realize that inasmuch as the past and present cannot be changed, it is pointless to wish they could be different. You will do your best to accept the past, whatever it might have been, and to embrace the present, whatever it might be.

Psychologist Robert Zajonc takes this claim one step further: “For most decisions, it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been any prior cognitive process whatsoever.”28 It isn’t that the decisions people make are irrational; it’s that the process by which decisions are made are utterly unlike the step-by-step rational process that might be used to solve, say, a math problem. Decisions are typically made in the unconscious mind, by means of some unknown process. Indeed,

Whereas the ordinary person embraces pleasure, the sage enchains it; whereas the ordinary person thinks pleasure is the highest good, the sage doesn’t think it is even a good; and whereas the ordinary person does everything for the sake of pleasure, the sage does nothing.

Those who have lived without a coherent philosophy of life, though, will desperately want to delay death. They might want the delay so that they can get the thing that—at last!—they have discovered to be of value. (It is unfortunate that this dawned on them so late in life, but, as Seneca observes, “what you have done in the past will be manifest only at the time when you draw your last breath.”)4 Or they might want the delay because their improvised philosophy of life has convinced them that what is worth having in life is more of everything, and they cannot get more of everything if they die.

Psychologist Arthur S. Reber offers the following summary of the psychological research on decision making: “During the 1970s . . . it became increasingly apparent that people do not typically solve problems, make decisions, or reach conclusions using the kinds of standard, conscious, and rational processes that they were more-or-less assumed to be using.” To the contrary, people could best be described, in much of their decision making, as being “arational”: “When people were observed making choices and solving problems of interesting complexity, the rational and logical elements were often missing.

If we wish to retain our freedom, says Epictetus, we must be careful, while dealing with other people, to be indifferent to what they think of us. Furthermore, we should be consistent in our indifference; we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval. Indeed, Epictetus says that when others praise us, the proper response is to laugh at them.3 (But not out loud! Although Epictetus and the other Stoics think we should be indifferent to people’s opinions of us, they would advise us to conceal our indifference. After all, to tell someone else that you don’t care what he thinks is quite possibly the worst insult you can inflict.)

Thus, tell someone that you possess and are willing to share with him an ancient strategy for attaining virtue, and you will likely be met with a yawn. Tell him that you possess and are willing to share an ancient strategy for attaining tranquility, though, and his ears are likely to perk up; in most cases, people don’t need to be convinced of the value of tranquility.

Success is very much like a drug: it makes you feel good; you don’t know what you are missing until you experience it; once you experience it, you want more; and in your attempts to recapture that first high, you will have to resort to ever bigger “doses.” And if success is like a drug, some drugs are like success: a cocaine high, I am told, very much resembles the rush of success.

The Stoics fell somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things. Indeed, they thought we should periodically interrupt our enjoyment of what life has to offer to spend time contemplating the loss of whatever it is we are enjoying. Affiliating

Something like this happens with the intellect. It can’t avoid the whining of the emotions and can’t hope to modify their behavior. The intellect quickly figures out that the only sensible way—indeed, the rational way—to deal with the emotions is to unhesitatingly give them what they want most of the time and thereby conserve its strength so it can fight and win the battles that really matter—namely, to overcome the most undesirable of those desires generated by the emotions.

Epictetus explained what becoming a Cynic would entail: “You must utterly put away the will to get, and must will to avoid only what lies within the sphere of your will: you must harbour no anger, wrath, envy, pity: a fair maid, a fair name, favourites, or sweet cakes, must mean nothing to you.” A Cynic, he explained, “must have the spirit of patience in such measure as to seem to the multitude as unfeeling as a stone. Reviling or blows or insults are nothing to him.”2 Few people, one imagines, had the courage and endurance to live the life of a Cynic. The

If the lackey replies that the voluptuary has already had a lot to drink, the voluptuary will be unfazed: he will simply gaze at the lackey with clouded eyes and repeat the demand. If the lackey ignores him, the voluptuary might start chanting, “Whiskey! Whiskey!” until the lackey can’t take it anymore. A better strategy for the lackey, if he wants the voluptuary to forgo whiskey, is to point out that if he drinks any more, he won’t be able to enjoy the women who will later be arriving for his amusement. This reminder might make the voluptuary drop his demand for whiskey.

The supporting role played by the intellect becomes apparent when a person is mentally depressed. Those who slip into depression are just as intelligent as they used to be. (If their score drops on an IQ test, it is because they don’t feel motivated to take the test, not because they became less rational.) But because of their depressed state, the flow of terminal desires formed by their emotions slows to a trickle. They no longer feel like eating, having sex, listening to music, or going to parties. In such cases, the intellect doesn’t generate terminal desires to take up the slack. Rather, it sits there idle.

Now imagine an ultra-headstrong five-year-old, who never tires of whining, whose whining can’t be avoided, and whose behavior can’t be modified. The parents of such a child would quickly realize the futility of resisting the child’s entreaties. They would realize that in the long run, their life will be tolerable only if they give the child what he wants most of the time and save their energy for a few well-chosen battles. These parents will quickly get into the habit of saying yes to their child. Indeed, so quickly will they say yes that we—and maybe they as well—might forget that they have the power to say no.

When our emotions form a terminal desire, we feel motivated to fulfill it: to do so will feel good, or at any rate, will feel better than not fulfilling it. But what about the instrumental desires our intellect forms so we can fulfill this terminal desire? Fulfillment of these instrumental desires won’t itself feel good; indeed, for the pre-law student to drag himself out of bed will feel distinctly bad. More generally, although the objects of terminal desires formed by the emotions are inherently desirable, the objects of instrumental desires formed by the intellect aren’t. What is it, then, that motivates us to fulfill these instrumental desires?

He believed hunger to be the best appetizer, and because he waited until he was hungry or thirsty before he ate or drank, “he used to partake of a barley cake with greater pleasure than others did of the costliest of foods, and enjoyed a drink from a stream of running water more than others did their Thasian wine.”6 When asked about his lack of an abode, Diogenes would reply that he had access to the greatest houses in every city—to their temples and gymnasia, that is. And when asked what he had learned from philosophy, Diogenes replied, “To be prepared for every fortune.”7 This reply, as we shall see, anticipates one important theme of Stoicism. The

The intellect can also use emotions not to fight emotions but to arouse them. Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, for example, describes a situation in which he is having trouble concentrating on his research. In order to stay focused, he imagines that a competing researcher is on the verge of solving the problem Minsky is trying to solve. The trick works: Minsky stays focused even though he knows, intellectually, that the other researcher is unlikely to solve the problem, inasmuch as he has never shown the least interest in it.2 Thus, although the intellect cannot command the emotions to commit to one of its projects, it might be able to trick them into committing.

The intellect, as we have seen, cannot command the emotions, but it can channel currently existing emotional energy. If, for example, the emotions want X, the intellect might talk them into wanting to do Y by pointing out that doing it will get them X. As soon as the emotions are convinced that doing Y will get them X, the anxiety they felt with respect to X will transfer to Y. The intellect can then point out to the emotions that by doing Z, they can get Y; again, the anxiety will transfer. In this manner, anxiety flows down the chains of desire formed by the intellect. We thereby become motivated to fulfill the instrumental desires in these chains, even though doing so won’t itself feel good—indeed, even though doing so will feel bad.

Although the strategy of gaining happiness by working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is obvious and has been used by most people throughout recorded history and across cultures, it has an important defect, as thoughtful people throughout recorded history and across cultures have realized: For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied. A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This