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Thursday, November 28, 2024

Wisdom from the Early Stoics, Zeno of Citium 72


Again, the good are genuinely in earnest and vigilant for their own improvement, using a manner of life which banishes evil out of sight and makes what good there is in things appear. 

At the same time they are free from pretense; for they have stripped off all pretense or "make-up" whether in voice or in look. 

Free too are they from all business cares, declining to do anything which conflicts with duty. 

They will take wine, but not get drunk. 

Nay more, they will not be liable to madness either; not but what there will at times occur to the good man strange impressions due to melancholy or delirium, ideas not determined by the principle of what is choiceworthy but contrary to nature. 

Nor indeed will the wise man ever feel grief; seeing that grief is irrational contraction of the soul, as Apollodorus says in his Ethics

—Diogenes Laërtius, 7.118 

IMAGE: Jan Roos, Narcissus at the Spring (c. 1620) 



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