Top 120 William B. Irvine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”

— William B. Irvine

2. “The problem is that “bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters,” and because they cannot control their desires, they can never find contentment.4.”

— William B. Irvine

3. “Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.”

— William B. Irvine

4. “It is, after all, hard to know what to choose when you aren’t really sure what you want.”

— William B. Irvine

5. “Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this – that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”

— William B. Irvine

6. “Rather, Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.”

— William B. Irvine

7. “Seneca’s comment to Lucilius that “the man who adapts himself to his slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little sum, is the truly rich man.”

— William B. Irvine

8. “Seneca’s essay “On Anger.” Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.” Because of anger, he says, we see all around us people being killed, poisoned, and sued; we see cities and nations ruined.”

— William B. Irvine

9. “One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.”

— William B. Irvine

10. “We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.”

— William B. Irvine

11. “Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.”

— William B. Irvine

12. “It will help us to overcome our anger, says Seneca, if we remind ourselves that our behavior also angers other people: “We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.”

— William B. Irvine

13. “Stoic test strategy: when faced with a setback, we should treat it as a test of our resilience and resourcefulness, devised and administered, as I have said, by imaginary Stoic gods.”

— William B. Irvine

14. “A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This.”

— William B. Irvine

15. “According to Epictetus, we should keep firmly in mind that we are merely actors in a play written by someone else – more precisely, the Fates. We cannot choose our role in this play, but regardless of the role we are assigned, we must play it to the best of our ability.”

— William B. Irvine

16. “The pursuit of virtue results in a degree of tranquility, which in turn makes it easier for us to pursue virtue.”

— William B. Irvine

17. “This in turn suggests the possibility of restating Epictetus’s dichotomy of control as a trichotomy: There are things over which we have complete control, things over which we have no control at all, and things over which we have some but not complete control.”

— William B. Irvine

18. “For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.”

— William B. Irvine

19. “Notice that the advice that we ignore what other people think of us is consistent with the Stoic advice that we not concern ourselves with things we can’t control.”

— William B. Irvine

20. “It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken”4 – as did Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

— William B. Irvine

21. “He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.”

— William B. Irvine

22. “When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.”

— William B. Irvine

23. “Most of us are “living the dream” living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.”

— William B. Irvine

24. “Pre-Socratic philosophy begins... with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.“3.”

— William B. Irvine

25. “After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.”

— William B. Irvine

26. “If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.”

— William B. Irvine

27. “It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united.“3.”

— William B. Irvine

28. “We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.”

— William B. Irvine

29. “One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.”

— William B. Irvine

30. “Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.”

— William B. Irvine

31. “One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you. Consequently, you should keep in mind the words of Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.”1.”

— William B. Irvine

32. “He adds that the worse a man is, the less likely he is to accept constructive criticism.”

— William B. Irvine

33. “On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.”

— William B. Irvine

34. “To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.”

— William B. Irvine

35. “By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.”

— William B. Irvine

36. “Besides advising us to avoid people with vices, Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.”

— William B. Irvine

37. “Theodore Roosevelt offered this bit of Stoic-inspired advice: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

— William B. Irvine

38. “More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.”

— William B. Irvine

39. “Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world – in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition.”

— William B. Irvine

40. “Ancient Egyptians, who made medicinal use of willow bark, which contains the same active ingredient as aspirin does, had a theory. They thought four elements flow in us: blood, air, water, and a substance called wekhudu. They theorized that an overabundance of wekhudu caused pain and inflammation and that chewing on willow bark or drinking willow tea reduced the amount of wekhudu in someone experiencing pain or inflammation and thereby restored his health.”

— William B. Irvine

41. “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

— William B. Irvine

42. “Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us – we must agree to go easy on one another.”1 Another thing to keep in mind.”

— William B. Irvine

43. “Stoic philosophy is like a fertile field, with “Logic being the encircling fence, Ethics the crop, Physics the soil.”

— William B. Irvine

44. “My other self lacks self-discipline; left to his own devices, he will always take the path of least resistance through life and as a result will be little more than a simple-minded pleasure seeker. He is also a coward. My other self is not my friend; to the contrary, he is best regarded, in the words of Epictetus, “as an enemy lying in wait.”

— William B. Irvine

45. “People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied: Experiencing luxury only whets their appetite for even more luxury.”

— William B. Irvine

46. “Negative visualization does not have these drawbacks. We don’t have to wait to engage in negative visualization the way we have to wait to be struck by a catastrophe. Being struck by a catastrophe can easily kill us; engaging in negative visualization can’t. And because negative visualization can be done repeatedly, its beneficial effects, unlike those of a catastrophe, can last indefinitely.”

— William B. Irvine

47. “How much should a Stoic grieve? In proper grief, Seneca tells Polybius, our reason “will maintain a mean which will copy neither indifference nor madness, and will keep us in the state that is the mark of an affectionate, and not an unbalanced, mind.”

— William B. Irvine

48. “Epictetus: “Always to seek to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the established order, and generally to believe that nothing except our thoughts is wholly under our control, so that after we have done our best in external matters, what remains to be done is absolutely impossible, at least as far as we are concerned.”

— William B. Irvine

49. “According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living: Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.”

— William B. Irvine

50. “Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, “He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.”

— William B. Irvine