Top 60 Donald J. Robertson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. He exhibits courage and self-control precisely by accepting these feelings, rising above them, and asserting his capacity for reason.”

— Donald J. Robertson

2. “The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly.”

— Donald J. Robertson

3. “This is important to note: for a Stoic to exhibit the virtue of temperance, he must have at least some trace of desire to renounce, and to exhibit courage he must have at least these first sensations of fear to endure.”

— Donald J. Robertson

4. “The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly.”

— Donald J. Robertson

5. “When we reason well about life and live rationally, we exhibit the virtue of wisdom. Living in agreement with Nature, in part, means fulfilling our natural potential for wisdom; that’s what it means for us to flourish as human beings.”

— Donald J. Robertson

6. “Freemasonry also celebrates the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, which correspond symbolically with the four corners of the lodge: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.”

— Donald J. Robertson

7. “Most men are eager to point out their neighbors’ flaws, he said, whether we ask them to or not. So instead of resenting it, we should welcome criticism from others as one of life’s inevitabilities and turn it to our advantage by making all men into our teachers. Galen therefore says that if we desire to learn wisdom, we must be ready to listen to anyone we encounter and show gratitude “not to those who flatter us but to those who rebuke us.”14.”

— Donald J. Robertson

8. “They also taught that our initial automatic feelings are to be viewed as natural and indifferent. These include things like being startled or irritated, blushing, turning pale, tensing up, shaking, sweating, or stammering. They are natural reflex reactions, our first reactions before we escalate them into full-blown passions.”

— Donald J. Robertson

9. “To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave.”

— Donald J. Robertson

10. “When you point your finger in anger at someone else, remember that three fingers on the same hand point back in your own direction.”

— Donald J. Robertson

11. “From the moment we’re born we’re constantly dying, not only with each stage of life but also one day at a time. Our bodies are no longer the ones to which our mothers gave birth, as Marcus put it. Nobody is the same person he was yesterday. Realizing this makes it easier to let go: we can no more hold on to life than grasp the waters of a rushing stream.”

— Donald J. Robertson

12. “According to Stoic philosophy, when we assign intrinsic values like “good” or “bad” to external events, we’re behaving irrationally and even exhibiting a form of self-deception. When we call something a “catastrophe,” for instance, we go beyond the bare facts and start distorting events and deceiving ourselves. Moreover, the Stoics consider lying a form of impiety – when a man lies, he alienates himself from Nature.”

— Donald J. Robertson

13. “The wise man is grateful for the gifts life has given him, but he also reminds himself that they are merely on loan – everything changes and nothing lasts forever.”

— Donald J. Robertson

14. “In typically blunt fashion he told them that sheep don’t vomit up grass to show the shepherds how much they’ve eaten but rather digest their food inwardly and produce good wool and milk outwardly.”

— Donald J. Robertson

15. “Wild beasts run away from dangers when they see them. Once they have escaped, they are free of anxiety. But we are tormented by both the future and the past.”

— Donald J. Robertson

16. “The Stoics can teach you how to find a sense of purpose in life, how to face adversity, how to conquer anger within yourself, moderate your desires, experience healthy sources of joy, endure pain and illness patiently and with dignity, exhibit courage in the face of your anxieties, cope with loss, and perhaps even confront your own mortality while remaining as unperturbed as Socrates.”

— Donald J. Robertson

17. “For instance, the majority of people are terrified of dying, but, as Epictetus points out, Socrates wasn’t afraid of death. Although he may have preferred to live, he was relatively indifferent to dying as long as he met his death with wisdom and virtue. This used to be known as the ideal of a “good death,” from which our word “euthanasia” derives.”

— Donald J. Robertson

18. “For instance, acting in accord with justice means preferring to achieve, Fate willing, an external outcome that is both fair and beneficial for humankind.”

— Donald J. Robertson

19. “What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.”

— Donald J. Robertson

20. “Wisdom, in all these forms, mainly requires understanding the difference between good, bad, and indifferent things. Virtue is good and vice is bad, but everything else is indifferent.”

— Donald J. Robertson

21. “Aristo rejected the study of logic and metaphysics, arguing that the primary concern of philosophers should be the study of ethics, an attitude we can find echoed in The Meditations.”

— Donald J. Robertson

22. “He showed me that there are more important things in life and that true wealth comes from being contented with whatever you have rather than desiring to have more and more.”

— Donald J. Robertson

23. “We’re told that Plato’s saying was always on Marcus’s lips: those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers.”

— Donald J. Robertson

24. “Whether we realize it or not, we are all living out the lives fated for us, either willingly or reluctantly. Zeno illustrated this with a striking metaphor: the wise man is like a dog tethered to a cart, running alongside and smoothly keeping pace with it, whereas a foolish man is like a dog that struggles against the leash but finds himself dragged alongside the cart anyway.”

— Donald J. Robertson

25. “Decatastrophizing, on the other hand, has been described as going from “What if?” to “So what?”: So what if such-and-such happens? It’s not the end of the world; I can deal with it.”

— Donald J. Robertson

26. “We see the flaws of others quite clearly, in other words, but we have a blind spot for our own.”

— Donald J. Robertson

27. “Modern cognitive therapists advise their clients to describe events in more down-to-earth language, like the Stoics before them. They call it “decatastrophizing” when they help clients downgrade their perception of a situation from provoking anxiety to something more mundane and less frightening.”

— Donald J. Robertson

28. “Even if we’ve never met them in person but only heard about them in stories, we are drawn to the wise and good, and make moral progress by emulating their example.”

— Donald J. Robertson

29. “Always accepting this and preparing yourself in advance to meet both success and failure with equanimity can help you avoid feeling angry, surprised, or frustrated when events don’t turn out as you might have wished.”

— Donald J. Robertson

30. “Stoics treat their own judgments and actions as the only thing truly good or bad. That inevitably shifts focus to the present and lessens emotional investment in the past and future.”

— Donald J. Robertson

31. “Beware of aggravating your troubles yourself and of making your position worse by your complaints. Grief is light when opinion does not exaggerate it; and if one encourages one’s self by saying, ‘This is nothing,’ or, at least, ‘This is slight; let us try to endure it, for it will end,’ one makes one’s grief slight by reason of believing it such.”

— Donald J. Robertson

32. “For Socrates, philosophy was not only a moral guide but also a kind of psychological therapy.”

— Donald J. Robertson

33. “We don’t control our initial reaction, perhaps, but we do control how we respond to it: it’s not what happens first that matters but what you do next.”

— Donald J. Robertson

34. “If your fundamental worldview, by contrast, assumes that your status in the eyes of others is of negligible importance, then it follows that you should be beyond the reach of social anxiety.”

— Donald J. Robertson

35. “Stoic determinism: the wise man who views the world rationally is never surprised by anything in life.”

— Donald J. Robertson

36. “However, that change won’t leap off the page. It only comes by making a firm decision, here and now, to begin putting ideas like these into practice. As Marcus wrote to himself, Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be; just be one.”

— Donald J. Robertson

37. “Epicurus’s saying. “Pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting, if you keep its limits in mind and do not add to it through your own imagination.”

— Donald J. Robertson

38. “Looking back on this time, Marcus was grateful that when he first began to dabble in philosophy he didn’t completely fall under the spell of a Sophist, like Fronto, or end up obsessively poring over books, working out logical puzzles, or speculating about physics and cosmology.”

— Donald J. Robertson

39. “Socrates used to say that death is like some prankster in a scary mask, dressed as a bogeyman to frighten small children. The wise man carefully removes the mask and, looking behind it, he finds nothing worth fearing.”

— Donald J. Robertson

40. “Do away with the judgment, and the notion “I have been harmed” is done away with; do away with that notion, and the harm itself is gone.”

— Donald J. Robertson

41. “Nevertheless, philosophy has taught him to be grateful for life and yet unafraid of dying – like a ripened olive falling from its branch, thanking both the tree for giving it life and the earth below for receiving its seed as it falls.”

— Donald J. Robertson

42. “The Stoics adopted the Socratic division of cardinal virtues into wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.”

— Donald J. Robertson

43. “Pleasures, as we’ve seen, can blind us to their consequences if we’re not careful. Lucius’s overindulgence would increasingly lead him to neglect both his own welfare and that of the empire.”

— Donald J. Robertson

44. “What’s required first is a more general openness to criticism: we should give everyone we meet permission to tell us what our faults are, according to Galen, and resolve not to be angry with any of them. Indeed, Marcus tells himself both to enter into every man’s mind, to study their judgments and values, and to let every man enter into his.”

— Donald J. Robertson

45. “Once we truly accept our own demise as an inescapable fact of life, it makes no more sense for us to wish for immortality than to long for bodies as hard as diamonds or to be able to soar on the wings of a bird. As.”

— Donald J. Robertson

46. “Epictetus’s own teacher, the Stoic Musonius Rufus, used to tell his students, “If you have leisure to praise me, I am speaking to no purpose.” Hence, the philosopher’s school, said Epictetus, is a doctor’s clinic: you should not go there expecting pleasure but rather pain.”

— Donald J. Robertson

47. “Seneca calls this praemeditatio malorum, or the “premeditation of adversity.”

— Donald J. Robertson

48. “Heraclitus: “We ought not to act and speak as if we were asleep.”

— Donald J. Robertson

49. “He believed that true strength consisted of one’s ability to show kindness, not violence or aggression.”

— Donald J. Robertson

50. “Hence, the philosopher’s school, said Epictetus, is a doctor’s clinic: you should not go there expecting pleasure but rather pain.”

— Donald J. Robertson