Stoicism

"Cynicism … is a withdrawal from the world into blank isolation, while Stoicism is the withdrawal into an inner life, which forms to its votaries an object of the highest enthusiasm. Hence the elation, often hyperbolical, which tinges the Stoical austerity; hence the attractiveness of the doctrine and its spread over the world."

"This gentleman’s stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself."

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the skeptic side, With too much weakness for the stoics pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much."

"If virtue is the sole good, there can be no reason against cruelty and injustice, since, as the Stoics are never tired of pointing out, cruelty and injustice afford the sufferer the best opportunities for the exercise of virtue."

"There goes with this a certain coldness in the Stoic conception of virtue. Not only bad passions are condemned, but all passions. The sage does not feel sympathy: when his wife or his children die, he reflects that this event is no obstacle to his own virtue, and therefore he does not suffer deeply. Friendship, so highly prized by Epicurus, is all very well, but it must not be carried to the point where your friends misfortunes can destroy your holy calm. As for public life, it may be your duty to engage in it, since it gives opportunities for justice, fortitude, and so on; but you must not be actuated by a desire to benefit mankind, since the benefits you can confer — such as peace, or a more adequate supply of food — are no true benefits, and, in any case, nothing matters to you except your own virtue. The Stoic is not virtuous in order to do good, but does good in order to be virtuous. It has not occurred to him to love his neighbour as himself; love, except in a superficial sense, is absent from his conception of virtue."

"To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it. We admire a medical man who risks his life in an epidemic of plague, because we think illness is an evil, and we hope to diminish its frequency. But if illness is no evil, the medical man might as well stay comfortably at home. To the Stoic, his virtue is an end in itself, not something that does good. And when we take a longer view, what is the ultimate outcome? A destruction of the present world by fire, and then a repetition of the whole process. Could anything be more devastatingly futile? There may be progress here and there, for a time, but in the long run there is only recurrence. When we see something unbearably painful, we hope that in time such things will cease to happen; but the Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. Providence, which sees the whole, must, one would think, ultimately grow weary through despair."

"[H]ighly favorable to the development of a systematic natural science... first and foremost, the Stoics believed in determinism... nothing willful... everything... according to law. The secret of human life was to fathom the general character of this universal order and to live in harmony with it. ...[A]strological divination... was justified by appealing to the harmony and interaction between celestial and terrestrial events. ...Greek atomists implied [that] atoms... by chance, happened to stay interlocked [in human bodies] for... seventy years... [T]he Stoics... preferred to start at... organized systems [having] integral properties... not derived from the... parts. ...This ...we call the ... a continuous dynamic agency... maintaining... cohesion... As we tighten a drum-head, the sound... rises in pitch. ...Now tension is not an additional ingredient... it is a state... The pneuma... exists in various... states of tension or tones... In some respects... an extension of the Pythagorean theory of musical harmonies. ...Several kinds of pneuma existed... The cohesive... responsible for the unity of a body, and for the fixed pattern of properties... the vital... gave it animation; while... rational... was only present in... thinking beings."

"One cannot accept the attitude of some among the Stoics, who said, "What does it matter to me if my family suffer? I can still be virtuous." The Christian principle, "Love your enemies," is good, but the Stoic principle, "Be indifferent to your friends," is bad."

"Stoicism, unlike the earlier purely Greek philosophies, is emotionally narrow, and in a certain sense fanatical; but it also contains religious elements of which the world felt the need, and which the Greeks seemed unable to supply."

"There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We cant be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesnt matter being unhappy. This doctrine is heroic, and, in a bad world, useful; but it is neither quite true nor, in a fundamental sense, quite sincere."

"The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: "harmony," issuing in the inaudible "music of the spheres," [as] the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically... Stoic philsophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate... as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity... as the price... for the harmony of the whole. The existence of the whole... is the ultimate and no further questionable, self-justifying end in this teleological scheme: for the sake of the cosmos its constituent parts exist... for the sake of the whole organism. Man... is by no means the highest mode of being, he is not the end of nature, and the cosmos is not for his sake."

"Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism — all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life."