Category: Echoes through time

Echoes through time: the lure of popularity

You cannot hope to be a scholar. But what you can do is to curb arrogance; what you can do is to rise above pleasures and pains; you can be superior to the lure of popularity; you can keep your temper with the foolish and ungrateful, yes, even care for them.

Marcus Aurelius (AD 120 – 180), Meditations (8.8)

Photo by Gary Ellis on Unsplash

Echoes through time: the man who lies to himself

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), The Brothers Kamarazov

Hat tip to Je t’aime / N’arrete pas.

Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash

Echoes through time: even self-restraint can comb its hair

The rough clothes, the rank growth of hair and beard, the sworn hatred of silverware, the pallet laid on the ground: all these and any other perverse form of self-aggrandisement are things you should avoid…

The life we endeavour to live should be better than the general practice, not contrary to it…

Philosophy demands self-restraint, not self-abnegation – and even self-restraint can comb its hair.

Seneca (4 BC – AD 65),  Moral Letters to Lucilius (5.2 – 5.5)

Worth a re-post in these locked down times.

Echoes through time: a striving struggle for a worthwhile goal

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905 – 1997), Man’s Search for Meaning (p110)

Note: the translation I have is “striving and struggling”, but I’ve also seen it translated as “What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather a striving struggle for a worthwhile goal.” which I think I prefer.

Echoes through time: It is not bodily hunger … but ambition.

A bull is filled up by only a few acres of pasturage; a single wood suffices for more than one elephant; yet a human being feeds upon land and sea. Why is that? Has nature given us such an insatiable maw that although the bodies we are given are of modest size, we yet surpass the largest, most ravenous eaters of the animal world? That is not the case … It is not bodily hunger that runs up the bill but ambition. Therefore let us regard those who, as Sallust says, “heed the belly” as belonging to the race of animals rather than of humans.

Seneca (4 BC – AD 65),  Moral Letters to Lucilius (60.2 – 4)