A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

In particular, he will be careful to set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (something external, over which he has only partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something internal, over which he has complete control).

just as you cannot welcome a visitor until he arrives, Marcus’s good man cannot welcome the experiences the looms of fate weave for him until those experiences have arrived.

persuade ourselves that whatever happens to us is for the best. I

we must learn to adapt ourselves to the environment into which fate has placed us and do our best to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us.

our internal goals will affect our external performance, but they also realized that the goals we consciously set for ourselves can have a dramatic impact on our subsequent emotional state.

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

game, he might go on to comment about what an astonishing thing glass vessels are: They are cheap and fairly durable, impart no taste to what we put in them, and—miracle of miracles!—allow us to see what they contain. This might sound a bit silly, but to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place.

the regular practice of negative visualization has the effect of transforming Stoics into full-blown optimists.

when the Stoics counsel us to live each day as if it were our last, their goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities. In particular, they don’t want us to stop thinking about or planning for tomorrow; instead they want us, as we think about and plan for tomorrow, to remember to appreciate today.

We should live as if this very moment were our last.