Know What You Can Control and What You Can’t

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.

The things within our power are naturally at our disposal, free from any restraint or hindrance; but those things outside our power are weak, dependent, or determined by the whims and actions of others.

Desire Demands Its Own Attainment

Our desires and aversions are mercurial rulers.

Desire and aversion, though powerful, are but habits. And we can train ourselves to have better habits. Restrain the habit of being repelled by all those things that aren’t within your control, and focus instead on combating things within your power that are not good for you. Do your best to rein in your desire. For if you desire something that isn’t within your own control, disappointment will surely follow; meanwhile, you will be neglecting the very things that are within your control that are worthy of desire. Of course, there are times when for practical reasons you must go after one thing or shun another, but do so with grace, finesse, and flexibility.

See Things for What They Are

Open your eyes: See things for what they really are, thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation.

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

Stop scaring yourself with impetuous notions, with your reactive impressions of the way things are!

Things and people are not what we wish them to be nor what they seem to be. They are what they are.

Events Don’t Hurt Us, But Our Views of Them Can

Things themselves don’t hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people. How we view these things is another matter. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble.

Don’t dread death or pain; dread the fear of death or pain.

We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.

No Shame, No Blame

One of the signs of the dawning of moral progress is the gradual extinguishing of blame. We see the futility of finger-pointing. The more we examine our attitudes and work on ourselves, the less we are apt to be swept away by stormy emotional reactions in which we seek easy explanations for unbidden events. Things simply are what they are. Other people think what they will think; it is of no concern to us. No Shame. No Blame.

Create Your Own Merit

Never depend on the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source.

Do your own useful work without regard to the honor or admiration your efforts might win from others. There is no such thing as vicarious merit.

Accept Events As They Occur

Don’t demand or expect that events happen as you would wish them to. Accept events as they actually happen. That way peace is possible.

Care for What You Happen to Have

Nothing can truly be taken from us. There is nothing to lose. Inner peace begins when we stop saying of things, “I have lost it” and instead say, “It has been returned to where it came from.” [[i-book/2021-08-28-手册#^919c74|2021-08-28-手册]]

The important thing is to take great care with what you have while the world lets you have it, just as a traveler takes care of a room at an inn.

The Good Life Is the Life of Inner Serenity

The surest sign of the higher life is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil. You can stop fretting about this and that.

It’s much better to die of hunger unhindered by grief and fear than to live affluently beset with worry, dread, suspicion, and unchecked desire.

Disregard What Doesn’t Concern You

Refrain from trying to win other people’s approval and admiration. You are taking a higher road. Don’t long for others to see you as sophisticated, unique, or wise. In fact, be suspicious if you appear to others as someone special. Be on your guard against a false sense of self-importance.

Conform Your Wishes to Reality

If it’s freedom you seek, then wish nothing and shun nothing that depends on others, or you will always be a helpless slave.

Understand what freedom really is and how it is achieved. Freedom isn’t the right or ability to do whatever you please. Freedom comes from understanding the limits of our own power and the natural limits set in place by divine providence. By accepting life’s limits and inevitabilities and working with them rather than fighting them, we become free. If, on the other hand, we succumb to our passing desires for things that aren’t in our control, freedom is lost.

Happiness Can Only Be Found Within

Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions. Vigilantly practice indifference to external conditions. Your happiness can only be found within.

Stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control.

Seeking to Please Is a Perilous Trap

If you want to live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes.

Consider What Comes First, Then What Follows, and Then Act

You can only be one person—either a good person or a bad person. You have two essential choices. Either you can set yourself to developing your reason, cleaving to truth, or you can hanker after externals. The choice is yours and yours alone. You can either put your skills toward internal work or lose yourself to externals, which is to say, be a person of wisdom or follow the common ways of the mediocre.

Our Duties Are Revealed by Our Relations with-One Another

Most people tend to delude themselves into thinking that freedom comes from doing what feels good or what fosters comfort and ease. The truth is that people who subordinate reason to their feelings of the moment are actually slaves of their desires and aversions. They are ill-prepared to act effectively and nobly when unexpected challenges occur, as they inevitably will.

Events Are Impersonal and Indifferent

Train your intentions rather than fooling yourself into thinking you can manipulate outside events.

What is a “good” event? What is a “bad” event? There is no such thing! What is a good person? The one who achieves tranquility by having formed the habit of asking on every occasion, “What is the right thing to do now?”

Safeguard Your Reason

The virtuous life depends on reason first and foremost. If you safeguard your reason, it will safeguard you.

Live Simply for Your Own Sake

Consider how much more frugal the poor are than we, how much better they forebear hardship. If you want to develop your ability to live simply, do it for yourself, do it quietly, and don’t do it to impress others.

The Soul’s Cry

Philosophy’s main task is to respond to the soul’s cry; to make sense of and thereby free ourselves from the hold of our griefs and fears.

Philosophy calls us when we’ve reached the end of our rope.

It’s true: there is no obviously apparent meaning to our lives.

[!Note] Nihilism from the Hellenistic age.

Philosophy asks us to move into courage. Its remedy is the unblinking excavation of the faulty and specious premises on which we base our lives and our personal identity.

The Real Purpose of Philosophy

Philosophy is intended for everyone, and it is authentically practiced only by those who wed it with action in the world toward a better life for all.

To ease our soul’s suffering, we engage in disciplined introspection in which we conduct thought-experiments to strengthen our ability to distinguish between wholesome and lazy, hurtful beliefs and habits.

The First Step

To know that you do not know and to be willing to admit that you do not know without sheepishly apologizing is real strength and sets the stage for learning and progress in any endeavor.

There is no such thing as conclusive, once-and-for-all knowledge.

The wise do not confuse information or data, however prodigious or cleverly deployed, with comprehensive knowledge or transcendent wisdom.

Spirited curiosity is an emblem of the flourishing life.

Arrogance is the banal mask for cowardice; but far more important, it is the most potent impediment to the flourishing life. Clear thinking and self-importance cannot logically coexist.

Trust Your Moral Intuitions

It is natural to want to be well-regarded by others, but you must gradually wean yourself from such dependence on the admiration or honor given or withheld by others. In good fortune or adversity, it is the good will with which you perform deeds that matters—not the outcome. So take your attention off of what you think other people think and off of the results of your actions. Defer instead to your original moral intuitions and follow them.

Stay the Course, in Good Weather and Bad

Regardless of what is going on around you, make the best of what is in your power, and take the rest as it occurs.

Be Grateful

Practice having a grateful attitude and you will be happy. If you take a broad view of what befalls each person and appreciate the usefulness of things that happen, it is natural to give thanks to the Ultimate for everything that happens in the world.