Stoic Quotes on Fear and Anxiety
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Seneca
(On The Shortness of Life - Chapter III)
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear.
Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow.
Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.
Quotes by Ancient Stoics
- Zeno of Citium »
- Aristo of Chios »
- Cleanthes »
- Chrysippus »
- Seneca the Younger »
- Gaius Musonius Rufus »
- Epictetus »
- Hierocles »
- Marcus Aurelius »
