"To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it. We admire a medical man who risks his life in an epidemic of plague, because we think illness is an evil, and we hope to diminish its frequency. But if illness is no evil, the medical man might as well stay comfortably at home. To the Stoic, his virtue is an end in itself, not something that does good. And when we take a longer view, what is the ultimate outcome? A destruction of the present world by fire, and then a repetition of the whole process. Could anything be more devastatingly futile? There may be progress here and there, for a time, but in the long run there is only recurrence. When we see something unbearably painful, we hope that in time such things will cease to happen; but the Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. Providence, which sees the whole, must, one would think, ultimately grow weary through despair."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book One, Part III, Chapter XXVIII, Stoicism, p. 255
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stoicism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection", would not suffer such emotions. They were profoundly concerned with the active relationship between notions of cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a form of will (called prohairesis) that is in
28 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Stoicism →
Related Quotes
"With what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering."
"This gentleman’s stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the aff…"
"I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tas…"
"Cynicism … is a withdrawal from the world into blank isolation, while Stoicism is the withdrawal into an inner life, …"
"It is no accident that Stoicism figures so prominently in Foucault’s The Care of the Self. It is, in the most literal…"
"Some philosophers, and the ancient Stoics among the rest, derived a topic of consolation under all afflictions, while…"
"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolor…"
"Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by …"
"The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... There…"
"'Tis pride, rank pride, and haughtiness of soul: I think the Romans call it Stoicism."